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Evolution Reaches A New Milestone
dalutong writes "Ximian has recently released Evolution v1.2 to the masses. New features include (among other ones that don't affect me as much) optional Emacs and XEmacs bindings in the email composer and much faster mailbox indexing (and thus loading.) It's nice to know evolution hasn't stopped."
XEmacs is Emacs with an X interface.
I think XEmacs has some different bindings than Emacs.
XEmacs is a fork of Emacs. Both can run inside X11, but they look differently and have some internal differences.
I think Evolution is VERY comparable to Outlook. I love some of the features that it has that Outlook lacks. For instance the ability to view HTML formatted mail but not download embedded images off the net. This means no more dot clear images tracking the message and no auto-run scripts doing dirty deeds.
;)
VFolders, a method of storing searches in a folder view format, are very nice. I must confess though, I don't use it much. I only have 5 VFolders configured.
Calendaring and contact management is great too, though I can't speak for Exchange interoperability with the Calendar, I feel confident based on Evolution that the connector would be good too.
As a whole I strongly recommend Evolution. It is an Outlook killer. Unfortunately though, it doesn't forward Melissa, Code-Red, Anna Kourikova, I Love You.....
Isn't it nice when you're having a discussion on IRC about Evolution needing to be ported to GTK2, you Google for the time line and get a post from July saying it'll be worked on after Evolution 1.2.
Then, I thought "well, I'll read the latest months news on the Evolution mailing list" and see this announcement.
Lo and behold, a trip to Slashdot, and what has just been posted.
This all happened between my morning and lunchtime Slashdot reading! Woo, the universe is on fire today. Perhaps if I think about Duke Nukem Forever it'll be out by next Tuesday.
Applause to Ximian for their new release and to the GTK2 developers everywhere. Gnome 2 is turning KDE users' heads.
XEmacs is Emacs with an X interface.
Um.. no it's not.. it's a different fork in the source. The X is (or was) about 'eXtended'. They both have a X interface, they both have a terminal interface.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Sigh. No. There's nothing about X11 that dictates that. In fact, in many respects, X11 is far more advanced than Windows. It's down to the authors of the application as to whether they want to copy or to innovate. Sadly with Evolution, they seem to mostly be going for the former, but that's their choice. If Ximian were targeting Windows instead of X11, I'm sure they'd still be bringing out essentially the same product.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
http://primates.ximian.com/~aaron/doing/evo-osx.ht ml
I think this doc is a few months old, but at least, with some effort, evolution has been run on OSX by at least one guy. he did have to build it from scratch, though, and says that it isn't "for the faint of heart" *support*, yes, is another thing ... i wouldn't hold my breath, but I know several ximian people with macs, so maybe they'll get frustrated and do it ;-)
.. Evo 1.2 has been announced on Ximian's website for quite a few hours, and has even made it to FootNotes, but..
...
Neither gnome.org or ximian's FTP servers carry the source, whether tarball or src.rpm. Oversight in a moment of excitement, or company policy? I sure hope it's the latter.
Oh, and CVS for evolution-1-2-branch is already bumped up to 1.2.0.99, so obviously they have had the time to release the source
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
Reply to myself to answer questions to other replies...
/my/ needs just as well as Outlook did, except for possibly...
1) No, I'm not kidding. Hence the "even better" line. I only use the filter activation, not the catch all sound.
2) Evolution filter actions can be activated on any of their filter criterions, which includes: Recipient, Subject, Specific Header, Message Body, Expression, Date Sent/Received, Label, Score, Size, Status, Follow Up, Attachments, Mailing List, Regex, Source Account, and Shell Command.
So, with Shell Command's as criterion AND actions, that basically means you can plugin whatever you want if it's not already in that exhaustive list.
In short, it's TOTALLY customizable to do just about anything I can personally imagine.
Personally, I use procmail to categorize my email into several separate pop boxes on the server, so I criterion playing a sound off my main spam free Source Account, and also added it as an action to my 'folderization' filters for a few important mailing lists.
And yes, I used Outlook on my Win work box for a long time, and yes, it has been FAR ahead of Free Software offerings. I liked Outlook quite a bit actually. But that's not the point, the point is that now Evolution meets
I'm looking forward to the Gnome 2 port mainly for the XFT fonts and Anti-Aliasing.
I think with Gnome 2.2 when things get a little more polished and the apps ported, Evolution 1.2, Galeon 2, etc, then the GNU/Linux desktop will really start to become viable for many people.
This explains the split between Emacs and Lucid Emacs and the journey to Emacs/XEmacs in more detail than you ever could have wanted.
1) select any email folder
2) View -> Hide Deleted Messages.
Now when you hit the delete key, you'll have a it in the Trash and marked as deleted still in the folder but now it will be invisible. I believe the Trash is simlpy a VFolder that shows messages marked as deleted from all categories thus it's not 2 copies of the message but only one copy visible from 2 places.
You can go directly to the release notes here..
I hate to feed the trolls, but debian unstable has xfree 4.2.1 as a quick look at the xfree86 package page would reveal.
Actually it's in testing as well.
Semper Ubi Sub Ubi
Well, it takes a few steps, but it can be done.
The way I did it, back when I moved to Linux full time on my desktop a little over a year ago, was to import all of my outlook express email into Mozilla, and then from Mozilla into Evolution. I'm not sure, but I'd imagine that the same technique would work for regular Outlook files.
You can set up an imap store on a Linux server and drag the messages from the Exchange folder to the imap folder. For that matter, you can drag them back to the Exchange server.
I'm running a fresh install of RedHat 8.0 on my Thinkpad T20. I downloaded the rpms from this Ximian ftp mirror site (other mirrors can be found here), moved them into a temporary directory, did an `rpm -e bonobo-conf-devel gtkhtml-devel`, then performed an `rpm -Uhv *rpm` from inside that temp directory. Evolution 1.2 installed perfectly, required no other file or library dependencies, and broke no existing file or library dependencies.
This definitely takes you off the path of pure RedHat Network up2date strategy, at least where those files/libraries are concerned, but for me it's worth the hassle of having the latest version of Evolution running on my system... YMMV, no warranty, etc.
Dave Haas
Chief Operating Officer
PopCap Games
I've been using the beta version of 1.2 for a week or so. Here are my thoughts:
1)The searches are considerably faster.
I'm a big pine fan, but evolution won me over on the basis of a single feature: the ability to search large folders quickly. I know it's possible to grep a mail directory, and I've even done so in the past, but the ease (and speed) of searches in evolution is so much greater that it effectively gives you a capability you didn't have before. This is astoundingly useful. For example, if I search my mail folder (28,776 messages) for "crackbaby," it takes 7 seconds to find the single message containing that word (somehow, I'm saddened that it was so few.)
As long as searches keep getting faster, evolution will keep getting better.
2)Bringing up new windows still takes a while, especially when the program has been running for a few days.
3)I'm a little disgusted by the fact that they've changed the key for going to the next unread message from 'n' to '.'. From what I've read on the developer's list, this was a big item of debate, and was ultimately won by the camp that wants the interface to be as natural for Outlook users as possible. It still sucks for us pine guys.
3)Nitpicking, but they need to add a keyboard shortcut for "Reply to List." As I understand Ximian's strategy, a large portion of the audience they target (at least for Connector sales) are the professionals who need to have two computers on their desk -- Linux to do all their work, Microsoft for things like email & word processing. Just my own opinion, but I'd expect such people to be disproportionately subscribed to high-volume lists. (Anybody with better information than my own, please respond).
All in all, I see 1.2 as a nice improvement, except for one or two nitpicks. Keep it up, Ximian!
Well, apparently you can do it from Outlook (Express or not), but you have to do it under Windows. That is to say: run Mozilla under 'doze, convert the PST files (does Express really use PST? I don't think so), and then Evolution can import them from Mozilla in linux.
;)
The problem is that lookOut files are in a proprietary format, and the only way Mozilla can do it is to take advantage of a Microsoft DLL file that--you guessed it--does not work/exist under linux
DMCA issues (if applicable) aside, I'm sure the *nix community as a whole (and 'doze users hoping to switch) would welcome someone writing a PST->mbx (or PST->Maildir!) converter for *nix.
The Evolution team at Ximian is very small and right now, after this release, they're focused soley on the GNOME 2 port.
That means no more new features for a while (and this applies to just about every other great idea people mentioned in this article's comments). But they're not very receptive to new ideas anyway, they usually respond (if they're in a good mood) "you want it? you code it. we're busy."
You should have a look at the wishlist items in bugzilla.ximian.com. Some of the most requested (and IMHO useful) features have sat there neglected for well over a year! So as far as a PST converter goes, I think you can pretty much forget it in the forseeable future.
All this said, Evolution is a great program, despite its flaws. It's all I've used for e-mail for over a year, and 1.2 kicks ass compared to 1.0x.
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
http://www.cyberus.ca/~phoenix/outport/
which exports Calendar,Contacts, and Tasks to Evolution.
That just leaves doing the manual mail part via Mozilla.
I guess that works, but its still a bit messy and not really appealing except for individual users. Its still better than nothing though I suppose.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Yes, happened to me too: calender crashed, and contact list completely whiped away.
Do the following:
exit evolution
killev
restart evolution
Now everything works and you have your contacts back end the calender works.
Tino Meinen
On a related note....
l
Ximian red-carpet is available for Red Hat 8.0, Mandrake 9.0, or SuSE 8.1 at http://ximian.com/products/redcarpet/download.htm
It would be even funnier if I did not read this on /. about 2 years ago.
You can't handle the truth.
Well, there's no VB implementation for Linux afaik, so no. You can do something similar though with external scripts I think. I'm curious about this too actually, I'll look into it.
Can you administrate permissions on your outlook folders and mailing lists with evolution mail? (exchange compatible question again)
No idea, sorry, I'd guess if this is an Exchange server feature then the Connector would adhere to its rules
Rich format or just html for email?
Come on, use your noggin! HTML of course, why bother with rich text when HTML can do it all? Bear in mind outside of Outlook land, html isn't at all dangerous, so it's perfectly trustable.
Meeting options?
I saw the screenshot of the meeting availability option, does that work with exchange's availability meeting info?
As a meeting option wouldn't be useful without a server to coordinate on, and Ximian don't make a server, I'd guess the answer would have to be yes.
Netmeeting (for meetings) Some of our meetings are spread around the US, so we use netmeeting so people can watch the powerpoint slideshow. Also a few of us can work on a document at the same time, or watch someone give a demo. All the netmeeting info is included in the email, the user just has to click and view. (That is still confusing for some people...)
Unless NetMeeting runs under Wine, no. I believe the rdesktop protocol it uses is available on Linux too now, but I don't know exactly.
Recall emails.
No, that's a non-feature imho. You said it yourself, you don't use it, most people get by without it somehow. Not a big loss.
I'm currently using office undervmware.
You may wish to look into CrossOver office
1) I don't want to have to receive everyone's full calendar by email in order to search for free time (when not using Exchange). Last I checked there was a way to enter the URL of someone else's calendar, but no instructions in the manual on how to format the calendar on the web/ftp site. And certainly nothing about how to put it up there. Put some WebDAV hooks into Evo and let an Apache server act as a "calendar hub".
2) Would be nice to sync my calendar with Yahoo! That's what keeps my wife on Windows.
3) Perhaps a plugin API for syncing to address books on cellphones.
That's all for now. I can't move until those work. Pine and Yahoo! until then.
Intelligent Life on Earth
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/steven.obrien2/index. html
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=gnome&m=1010157075 21446&w=2
http://www.geocities.co.jp/SiliconValley/1596/en/c ygwin.html
Unfortunately, I don't see any new efforts at a port of Evolution to Windows, but as it improves folks will start to demand it everywhere they are.
Mac OSX users are much more lucky -- they can get Evolution right now. Fink lists it as a ported app.
It would be nice to have a Windows CD with all X apps so that folks can see that *nix systems aren't usually text-based or some ugly form of CDE. Till then, I've found the boot CD and full Debian distributionKnoppix to be an ideal introduction. Blew the socks off of a admin I showed it to who didn't know it was possible, and impressed others who like the idea of Linux but can't be bothered with actually learning anything (kids, job, wife, do the math).
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.