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

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.

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.
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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)

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.