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."

Comments

Emacs vs. XEmacs?

[Istealmymusic]

Why do Emacs and XEmacs have to be listed differently and separately? Is there a reason for their duplicity, or does xemacs run on X11? Someone fill me in.

Phew

[HRbnjR]

I beat the Slashdotting by grabbing this a mere hour ago :-)

The blurb fails to mention the one new feature which makes this release very worthwhile, at least for me... Sound support! You can now have it play a sound on receipt of any incoming mail. Even better, you can use sounds as actions in filters, so you can set it up to not beep at you every 30 seconds when you receive spam or mail list traffic.

Also of note is the increased feeling of polish moving from 1.08. I really can't wait for the 1.4 release when it's ported to Gnome 2.

Unstable

[bombdotcom]

Too bad evolution has been -- for me -- one of the most unstable apps I've ever used. It breaks due to dependency problems (wombat, bonobo, gconf, etc.) every time I upgrade something via red-carpet. At this moment, I can't even start evolution due to some stupid dependency problem that's not adequately explained in any docs, error messages, or mail lists I've been able to find. I could never recommend it to a friend.

Good thing I prefer pine configured to use vi as its composer anyway.

Re:The plusses of integration

[Com2Kid]

• Sigh. No. There's nothing about X11 that dictates that.

Neccitating building from the ground up mayhaps?

Ok put it this way;

implementing window transparency support in, err, Windows, is ONE LINE OF CODE (namely an API call. :) )

Actual programs to do something with this (put a UI around it and all that) can take up, oh, 5 or 6 kilobytes of code compiled.

Heh.

The API call is stable, it has been there since Windows 2000, it is not going anywheres anytime soon, though developers who don't mind pissing off Windows 2000 customers (which they should be mindful of. ^_^ ) can even use hardware acceleration for some of the GUI elements.

About the only thing that X-11 seems to give to developers is some damn fine networking material. Now I will grant that Windows, err, sucks when it comes to remote usage. It sucks and it sucks horribly. 128kbit is not enough. 256kbit is not enough. Quite frankly I do not know the minimum bandwidth that IS enough, Netmeeting sucks. A lot. Heh. But it does its job, more or less. On occasion.

But cruddo, anything else? Want to play a video in a window? Sound? Music? Heck just shoving GUI elements together even. Things integrate with less seems and less work then they do on X-11.

The reason for this should be quite obvious. The Windows API sucked for the longest time. Heck it was revised a few times and came out sucking even MORE.

But MS is nothing else if not persistent. They kept at it until they had something usable on their hands. Usable AND modern (more or less. :P ) While it isn't OSX, it also doesn't need to thwamp the CPU to get anything done (heh).

X-11, err, well. Heh. There isn't much actually to it. . . . It is not very close to the hardware, which is a good thing for portability, but it makes creating a consistent user experience all that much harder.

Re:A few thoughts:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, with sound support that's activated on filters and the vsubjects and everything. Evolution is a killer everyday e-mail client.

The one thing that it's missing and I don't think they plan on adding is allowing you to leave the messages on server, but delete them from the server when you delete them like Outlook does. I don't think it'd be that hard....maybe something for me to code myself.

Outlook and VB

[BrookHarty]

Can you run visual basic scripts on Evolution mail on exchange? (Or some other scripting language)

One of the things I do when my email gets too big, run a vb script that saves all attachments. Then deletes the attachment from the email. I can take a 100meg folder and reduce it to 5 megs. Currently I have a few mailing lists and that plus normal work email its easy to get about 30 megs of email a day. (hourly statistics, office docs, etc)

Can you administrate permissions on your outlook folders and mailing lists with evolution mail? (exchange compatible question again)

We have a few emailing lists for vendors/interal departments/etc, and I need to be able to add/remove them.
Also we give permission to our folders when we are on vacation, so people can scan for any customer who emailed us directly without going to the correct support email address. (Ya, customers would never do that would they?)

Rich format or just html for email?

I know when I'm trying to work with someone its nice to highlight some instructions in yellow, or key parts. Rich Text is very handy for that. I guess html would be ok, but I tend to stay away from that in outlook.

Meeting options?

I saw the screenshot of the meeting availability option, does that work with exchange's availability meeting info?

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...)

Recall emails.

Can you recall an email after you sent it? I see people doing that all the time, i normally turn it off so they cant recall and hide the evidence. :>

PST files.

I'm currently using office undervmware. But I share my configs/rules/etc on a windows share, so I can boot into winxp when I want the extra speed (laptops are slow..), when I need to work on very large excel spreadsheets.

Hell, one of the reasonsI can use Koffice/OO/SO is sometimes they use =hex2dec office addins, or other nonstandard stuff.
-
You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun. - Al Capone (1899 - 1947)

Re:Outlook and VB

[slide-rule]

Recall emails.
Can you recall an email after you sent it? I see people doing that all the time, i normally turn it off so they cant recall and hide the evidence.

"Recall" is an Outlook hack (in my opinion and understanding). It sends a second message that tells the client "hey, if you got this other message, and it is still on the server, and the user hasn't read it yet, and they haven't turned this feature off, and its Tuesday and raining, then silently delete that message before the user sees it."

Given at work I have all my mail configured to re-route into a PST, "recalls" don't work, so I get two messages from some dork. (Worked out great once to figure out who the hell was anonymously spamming the entire company every day and redirect some geek hell on his a$$, but that's another story ... when the first message had his full sig accidentally appended.)

I don't know if Evo. supports a way of doing this (i.e., sending a message that causes another message to disappear) but I'd wager it would rely on the server and/or client to know what/how to do this, and given you can't control your mom or grandmother's AOL client (generic "your"), I can't imagine it'd serve much purpose.

MS Outlook innovation? Depends on your point of view, I guess.

Agreed, somewhat

[robbo]

I use evo for IMAP at home and school, and have encountered period instability. I have 1.2 installed and so far no real problems, although the now-famous Emacs bindings don't seem to work. I've heard horror stories from friends, though, claiming it messed up their contacts. I'm afraid to try the sound support.

Btw, anyone know if there will eventually be newsgroup support? That's the one feature that keeps me bouncing back to mozilla.

Re:Why Open Source Needs Microsoft

[mijok]

UI design costs money but so does coding and that raises a question: Why don't usability experts contribute to open source projects the same way people writing the code do? Is it because they don't want to contribute for free or is it because coders are likely to ignore their recommendations anyway in favor of their own personal preferences and then say "I'm doing this voluntarily so don't tell me what to do!" I'm just asking - not trying to offend anyone.

License??

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't terribly easy to find Ximian's license -- I find that a bit disturbing. They focus on being open-source but damn if I could find license specifics on there homepage. Is this GPL code or what?

It can't do PST files though

[bogie]

I find it odd that you would clone Outlook and then not be able to import the files that Outlook uses. I mean no matter what Ximian says, Evolution IS an Outlook clone for linux users.

Without the ability to import PST files they are completely ignoring the very users which they are trying to attract. Unless of course they aren't interested in those users, which I would have a hard time believing considering how the program has been designed.

More on Evolution itself, I think besides the PST thing, its a fantastic program. Compared to the early versions, it launches and closes in a reasonable period of time. It's good looking and really I think is without a doubt the best opensource "full-featured" email/Pim every made.

One thing I also wonder about is a win32 port of the program. Just like OpenOffice eases the transition because you can get started on a windows version first, so would a windows version of Evolution. I know, easier said then done, but its something to think about.

Re:The plusses of integration

[Com2Kid]

• I dont even consider X usable on the network, tightvnc or remote desktop does a better job at that.

TightVNC is in my experience just a tad wee bit slower then remote desktop for Windows to Windows connections. 800x600@8bit color over a 128kbit upstream 1.5Mbit downstream.

I guess I should try it again now that I am at 256kbit upsteam, but for some reason I doubt it will be too much better, remote desktop did not improve much. . . .

Re:gnome armageddon

[1jpablo1]

I find somewhat strange your statment about gnome being promising because it's written in C. Following that logic, I'd say it should be written in assembler, isn't it?

Seriouslly, it's more efficient to code in something like ocaml, or ruby (with critical parts in C/C++) than in a "low" level language such as plain C.

But, anyone is free to spent its own time as one wishes, so I won't complain.

Regarding the direccion taken by the developers, it's of course sad if they wont listen to some users, but this being free software, anyone could fork the code. That's why I don't think this situation is such a tragedy.

Personally I do like evolution, but at any rate prefer the whole kde desktop than gnome's.

Compile evolution with only email support?

[Moloch666]

Looking at the Makefile in FreeBSD ports I don't see any such options --disable-calendar, etc.

I just need a good X email client that will handle HTML good and put the red underline on mispelled words. Like KMail with that feature would be fine. Even better Eudora for X. Eudora is my favorite client.

Oh well I guess my search continues or I break down and install evolution with added features I don't need.