Evolution 2.0 Released, Screenshots

comforteagle writes "This seems to be slow getting out, but since Novell hasn't updated their site ... Evolution 2.0.0 has been released. Most importantly it has built in JunkFilter support with SpamAssassin, web calendars, and NNTP support. Oh, and some bugfixes. I've posted some screenshots today as well."

Comments

Remarkably

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution 2.0 was created in a mere 7 days (with 1 of them being for rest).

Re:Remarkably

[Anonymous Coward]

Coincidentally, God was the winner of the very first Darwin Award. ;)

Re:Remarkably

[Skeezix]

Actually you are wrong. Even more amazingly it was created by millions of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters over billions of years.

Re:Remarkably

[AceCaseOR]

Actually you are wrong. Even more amazingly it was created by millions of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters over billions of years.

Well, if you want to be nitpicky it was created by millions of monkey's banging on typewriters... but I digress...

Re:Remarkably

[Anonymous Coward]

They shouldn't have rested...

What's up with this one screenshot?

here the text boxes are all going off the little window part??

Re:Remarkably

[EnronHaliburton2004]

I'm not sure I want to think about monkeys banging their typewriters...

Re:Remarkably

[kLaNk]

How the heck is that redundant?
Why is the parent redundant?

(Redundancy added as a teaching tool, notice the *real* redundancy in the two statements above)

Seriously, I think sometimes the average /. mod uses some rand() script to dish our their 5 pieces of power.

Re:Remarkably

[roror]

"I'm not sure I want to think about monkeys banging their typewriters..."

and what you definitely don't want to think about is, you are the end product of it.

Re:Remarkably

[Yeochee]

"Every month since June, the number of Iraqis and American Troops who have died has increased"
It would be weird if the number of dead would have decreased, unless the US army is experimenting with zombies of course.

Re:Remarkably

[chawly]

And justly so !

Re:Remarkably

[EnronHaliburton2004]

The numbers of soldiers who have died per month has increased.

Personally, I think it's pretty sick to joke about people who are asked to die for their country.

Re:Remarkably

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I think it's pretty sick to joke about people who are asked to die for their country.

Personally, I think it is much sicker to lie to people asking them to die for their country.

Re:Remarkably

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure I want to think about monkeys banging their typewriters...

Still, it's better than watching typographers spanking their monkeys. Trust me...

Re:Remarkably

[Anonymous Coward]

My God, great pun, man!

MODS, PLEASE MOD PARENT UP: +5 FUNNY!

Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.

Mono?

[FuzzzyLogik]

Why didn't they write this in mono? I know they were in development probably in parallel but still it would be a great way to showcase that mono can do all that good stuff..

Re:Mono?

[oxymor00n]

Yeah, rewrite a whole application just for the sake of it. Good idea, really ;)

Re:Mono?

[noselasd]

Or why didn't they write it in Python ? Or C++/Qt (Which is Novells preferred platform on Linux/SuSE) ?

The question to ask is _why_ should they write it in C# ?! I for one
don't need the extra slowness and memory usage introduced by mono.

Re:Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's now officially part of Gnome and nobody wants years of work depending on Microsofts patented API's?

Re:Mono?

[Phleg]

Score: 5, Informative?

How is this informative? They didn't rewrite Evolution in Mono because that would have involved rewriting hundreds of thousands of lines of code, for little benefit.

Re:Mono?

[noselasd]

How is this informative?

Because some C#/mono zealots got modpoints ?

Re:Mono?

[k98sven]

No.. there is no formal connection between Mono and Evolution, although both are products of Ximian.

A very good read is this piece by Havoc Pennington, of GNOME fame.

Basically he says that there are ideas that integrating some high-level, sandboxed platforms like Mono/.NET and/or Java into the Linux desktop. (or more specifically, GNOME)

He also says that they're not going to use Mono or Java in Gnome (and where Gnome goes, Evolution goes) until there is some kind of road-map on which technology should be used and how.

Personally, I find Java more compelling. C# may be a nicer language, but there is no control over which direction the class libraries will take. The Java Community Process is at least a somewhat open alternative.

Re:Mono?

[RPoet]

The question to ask is _why_ should they write it in C# ?!

I'm sorry, but he didn't mention C# at all. He said mono. Mono works with any number of languages (including your mentioned Python).

(btw, there's no space between a sentence and a question mark :)

Re:Mono?

[gregeth]

Actually it is a good point. The big benefit with writing Evolution in C#, is that(in theory) it could then be platform dependent. If Novell released Evolution for Windows, then they could create a strong competitor to Outlook. And then not have to worry about making the user run Gtk on Windows.

I can see one issue that it should require Mono, instead of Microsoft's .NET framework. Just imagine all the problems that could happen if it depended on .NET, and Microsoft decided to "patch" the framework.

Re:Mono?

[codergeek42]

Personally, I find Java more compelling. C# may be a nicer language, but there is no control over which direction the class libraries will take. The Java Community Process is at least a somewhat open alternative. Yes, but seeing as how GNOME is mainly a FSF/GNU project (the GNU Network Object Model Environment), I would think that the developers would be hesitant about using Mono/.NET or Java because both of those languages are not Free (read: Freedom).

Re:Mono?

[k98sven]

It's not as far off the mark as you think though.

There are Evolution extensions being written in C#.

(And this has lead to rumors about all of Evolution being rewritten in C#, but I don't think that's any more likely than you do)

Re:Mono?

[k98sven]

I would think that the developers would be hesitant about using Mono/.NET or Java because both of those languages are not Free (read: Freedom).

Mono is a Free implementation of .NET.
For Java there's gcj and others.
That's what Havoc (and I) were referring to.

Of course, the specifications of these languages and platforms isn't Free (as in Freedom).
But: I'd like to recall the fact that GNU/Linux started out as a clone of the non-free Unix system.
(GNU's Not Unix)

Re:Mono?

[BrokenHalo]

I often wonder if Microsoft isn't just waiting for the most damaging time to pull the rug out from under mono developers by slapping them with a suit for intellectual property or copyright violation over .NET.

IANAL, but I have a bit of a tendency to be a bit of a conspiracy theorist... :-)

Re:Mono?

[SoSueMe]

So, it's an evolutionary thing?

Re:Mono?

[Zach Garner]

(btw, there's no space between a sentence and a question mark :)

Your parentheses are unbalanced.

Re:Mono?

[FuzzzyLogik]

I didn't say C# as someone stated. I simply wondered why they would choose to write mono if their own applications won't even take advantage of their own framework. Did they write it just to write it and waste their time or what? I would hope that Novell/Ximian would support their own framework and use it, and as stated sure would make things more platform independent.

Ultimately I just wondered why they didn't use it, that's all, no hidden meaning, no jokes, no nothing, just wondered why.

Re:Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because for the present, Mono is not part of the core Gnome platform. Given the objective of making Evolution a part of Gnome (e.g everything using e-d-s), using Mono is not currently an option.

Re:Mono?

[shutdown -p now]

For the same reason Microsoft didn't write Office 2003 in .NET

Re:Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly.

So, why didn't they?

NR

Re:Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean like MonoDevelop?

Re:Mono?

[Deusy]

No.. there is no formal connection between Mono and Evolution, although both are products of Ximian.

The fact they are both products of the same company IS a formal connection.

Re:Mono?

[KeyserDK]

Platform independence works in C too.

Check out abiword. They are doing each platform in their native GUI as a seperate frontend. Which actually produces a better result.

IE. Firefox doesn't look like an windows application, and certainly doesn't look/work like an gnome/gtk application. You get some crappy hybrid.

Re:Mono?

[Anonymous Coward]

PElase sto[ puting spaces before yoru pucntuatoin. I'ts anoyinf. Thanl yoi.

--
Alwyas proffred@

Re:Mono?

[VagaStorm]

I fore one would love to ditch outlook... I have eaven have some friends that are almost fanatic aboute M$ that would like to scrap outlook :D

Gnome 2.8

[Anonymous Coward]

It was released with Gnome 2.8, nothing to see here.

Needs more cowbell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, this looks so gray and bland compared to Outlook -- needs some color to spice it up -- even on the default theme.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[codergeek42]

needs some color to spice it up -- even on the default theme

Not to be rude to the GNOME or GTK+ developers, but why are you using the default theme? Evolution is very well integrated with GNOME and your GTK+ 2.x settings. Use a much better theme and Evolution will look much better.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[moosesocks]

He's right! The look is downright depressing and simply lacks any sort of contrast.

'Default' should be good for 95% of all users. This default theme sucks, no offense to the developers.

The only colors used in the program are shades of grey and brown. Did they use the old DOS Doom color palate? The curved lines are a nice start, but they've still got to make it less boxy.

I'm frankly surprised at this, that the combined minds of novell and SUsE who have traditionally been rather good UI designers have let something like this be released.

Even the toolbar is cluttered.

For starters, draw all new icons. These ones suck from an artistic standpoint. Applications should be pleasant to look at. It makes users happy. Take a cue from OS X mail.app and change 'Send/Receive' to 'Get Mail' -- much more human-readable and less wordy. Group reply and reply-to-all under one drop down list similar to the one used for 'New' (but make that darn arrow smaller). Do you really need 'Print' on the toolbar? It's debatable, but you won't loose much functionality by removing it. Finally, 'Cancel' -- the button has no definite function. WHAT exactly are you cancelling? Why would you want to? Mail readers don't exactly do long intensive operations that one would normally want to cancel. 'Not Junk' is also unnecessary. If it's not 'junk', I think we can assume that it's also 'not junk' DUH!

The rest of the app ain't bad. It looks like most other mailreaders. The left pane is also nice, though the icons should all be redrawn, and the icons for Mail/Contacts/Calendars should scale to be as big as the buttons and be nice and visually appealing.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[ad0gg]

I don't know why your post is modded funny. It should be insightful. Flashy interfaces mean a lot to people. How many people buy a car on the way it looks? Simple marketing, flashy interfaces makes product look well built. Same goes with websites.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Doom had lots of colours. Quake was the grey/brown iD game.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[codergeek42]

Doom had lots of colours.
So 256 is still conidered 'a lot'? Wow you must be old! =P

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Needs some color to spice it up? Good god no! This is *why* I use Evolution. If you want the glitz use something like kdepim. I think Evolution looks awesome. Save my eyes, follow the K you "pretty" people.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[GreyWolf3000]

Not to mention olive green. Yuck.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Mail readers don't exactly do long intensive operations that one would normally want to cancel.

Ever tried retrieving a >1MB mail on dial-up?

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[shutdown -p now]

That's why KDE is still #1 for home desktops.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[shutdown -p now]

The theme on those screenshot is not the default GNOME theme. Icons and fonts are from the default theme, but widgets, windeco and colors are not. I think it's Industrial, Ximian's own theme, which is the default theme in Ximian Desktop.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[NotZed]

If you'd notice, the pictures have all been converted to a low colour resolution to reduce bandwidth requirements.

I'm not saying its normally particularly colourful, but that particular theme and those screenshots aren't entirely representative of how it actually looks.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[neverkevin]

The worst part is I got the SNL reference.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[antic]

You're on the ball. It looks so "linux" and when I say that, I mean it looks like it's been designed by programmers:

http://osdir.com/screenshots/index.php?directory =e volution2.0&currentPic=3

Where's the focus? It's all over the place. There's so much potential, but it's just not a clean design. The icons at the top and then the search bar are probably the worst offenders in the above screenshot.

The Mail/Contacts/Calendars/Tasks buttons are just too big. Integrate them a little more and the Inbox folder tree will have more space and less chance of requiring scrollbars, etc.

There are some ideas worth stealing from Outlook, but there are other things worth improving on from a UI perspective.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[mattyrobinson69]

i use kde because i find it to be much more functional than gnome. i also like how customisable it it, so i do customise it. not that i normally answer trolls

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[Knuckles]

'Not Junk' is also unnecessary.

If a mail erroneosly got filed into the Junk folder, you need a way to tell it that it is in fact legitimate mail, no?

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, why is it that every interface on Linux looks so...unprofessional. EVEN Windows XP looks better (especially with WB) because it's polished.

Some competent artists are desperately needed.

Re:Needs more cowbell.

[Anonymous Coward]

I got a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell.

Win32?

[CdBee]

I see links to the usual *nix builds. There was some talk a while ago, sparked by Eugenia's interview on osnews.com with Miguel de Icaza, that Evolution 2.0 would be fully cross-platform.

Oh well. Guess I stay with Thunderbird.

Re:Win32?

[adam mcmaster]

I don't remember reading anything about a Windows version, but given it's newfound gnome integration I doubt that anything like that will happen.

Re:Win32?

[Noksagt]

Great point, but cygnome is a somewhat viable way of porting gnome apps.

No job, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because anyone with one would know today is Monday.

For Some reason...

[ajiva]

For some reason Evolution has ALWAYS been faster on my machine than Thunderbird or Mozilla mail. Plus looking at the screenshots it looks like they've simplified Evolution even more, so I'm hoping it'll be that much nicer. Of course it still looks like an Outlook clone...

Re:For Some reason...

[Amiga Lover]

> Of course it still looks like an Outlook clone...

That's something that's annoyed me with a lot of apps. What's with the gigantic fischer-price GUIs? are enterprise people attracted to that sort of thing?

Re:For Some reason...

[Noksagt]

Not as good as native, but 1.4 (maybe higher too) seems to run on cygwin.

Re:For Some reason...

[Noksagt]

I'm a dumbass who put that under the wrong parent. please ignore it! Sorry.

Re:For Some reason...

[That's Unpossible!]

What's with the gigantic fischer-price GUIs? are enterprise people attracted to that sort of thing?

Try running these "gigantic fischer-price GUIs" on a large monitor at a high resolution, and you'll instantly know why they are appealing.

Re:For Some reason...

[Anonymous Coward]

Try running these "gigantic fischer-price GUIs" on a large monitor at a high resolution, and you'll instantly know why they are appealing.

Damn straight!

Re:For Some reason...

[upsidedown_duck]

Of course it still looks like an Outlook clone...

Not to mention that Outlook has an atrocious UI trying to do everything at once. Of all the MS apps to clone, Outlook is probably the best one to overlook.

Re:For Some reason...

[pebs]

What's with the gigantic fischer-price GUIs? are enterprise people attracted to that sort of thing?

As another poster has mentioned, trying running in 1600x1200. In any case, for GTK+ you can change the size which affects all the widgets, effectively scaling the GUI.

Re:For Some reason...

[sploo22]

Maybe because they're attractive? Say what you will about Microsoft as a business, but I've always found Outlook to be a very usable piece of software in terms of its interface.

Re:For Some reason...

[tomboy17]

Actually, the reason for big buttons (which is what I think you mean by "fischer-price") is simple: Fitts' law: The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

In other words, it's a hell of a lot easier for a user to press a big button than it is for user to press a small button. (Even better than big buttons are the edges of the screen, which are effectively infinitely wide/tall).

Unless you're on a tiny screen and need to maximize real-estate, you're much better off with big buttons. Hard to believe I know.

(I used to be a fluxbox/ratpoison kind of guy myself, but I've discovered GNOME + good key bindings + F11-to-go-fullscreen-when-I-need-it is really much easier to get around)

Re:For Some reason...

[NotZed]

No you can't.

It doesn't scale very well at all. All of the spacing is hard coded, and must be according to the hig. So the best you can do is use small fonts, which then means your buttons are even more spaced out.

Re:For Some reason...

[mrawl]

Agreed! I refuse to use an Outlook clone. It is worse then shameful - it is boringly shameful.

Re:For Some reason...

[bendermannen]

You know... This is configurable in GNOME. You could change so that no images are displayed in the menubar or so that only images are visible in the menubar.

Re:For Some reason...

[omicronish]

That's something that's annoyed me with a lot of apps. What's with the gigantic fischer-price GUIs? are enterprise people attracted to that sort of thing?

Surprisingly, yes. I know a lot of people who knowingly keep the default Windows XP Luna scheme (I've asked them about it), and others who use the silver variant. So yes, some of you people may hate it but there do exist people out there who like the large UI elements and colors. People like my parents, whose eyesight are slowly getting worse with age. They surf the Internet with huge fonts, and a large 'fischer-price' UI definitely helps with eye strain.

With that said, I don't see anything wrong with making Evolution resemble Outlook as long as it borrows the good parts of Outlook's UI. Evolution needs a bit more contrast (someone else here mentioned it looked gray), but otherwise it's very slick and elegant.

Re:For Some reason...

[Taladar]

And I always found its Interface to absolutely suck when trying to help my father in understanding it.
Sure, I can use most Interfaces by trying them out and guessing how they work but with some this works for non-geeks too and with others (e.g. Outlook) it does not.

NNTP

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone use Evolution for NNTP? With the plethora of NNTP readers that have been around longer than the WWW I wonder who even does this these days via what is basically a mail reader.

Re:NNTP

[einhverfr]

Does anyone use Evolution for NNTP? With the plethora of NNTP readers that have been around longer than the WWW I wonder who even does this these days via what is basically a mail reader.

Surely you can provide source code for an NNTP client running on the Babbage Difference Machine!!!

Re:NNTP

[NotZed]

Well it would be hard for anyone to use it for nntp yet since it only got enabled as a supported target in this release.

If you like tin i'm sure you'll keep using it ...

red-carpet channels?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know when it will show up on red-carpet channels?

Re:red-carpet channels?

[Anonymous Coward]

its up now on the evolution development snapshot channnel

Linux apps on Windows

[augustz]

It would be great for folks to realize that writing apps cross-platform is one of the single best ways to get TONS of adoption, and ease any eventual transitions to Linux.

I'll bet that despite being more featurefull, Evolution will be trounced be Thunderbird in terms of usage in the foreseable future.

But cool to see a very swanky looking release.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[Phleg]

It would be great for folks to realize that writing applications in a cross-platform manner is not always possible or even desirable.

Cross-platform applications require much work in maintaining that cross-platform capability. Not only that, but they must sacrifice potential features of operating environments for the sake of being cross-platform. Evolution happens to rely quite extensively on some of the advanced features provided by libgnome--which, coincidentally, isn't available on Windows.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[Jahf]

So if I read you and the parent correctly ... if I write an application that is not compatible with Windows it is inherrently not cross platform?

Let's see ... Evo runs on Linux, *BSD, Solaris ... probably on OSX if you take the time ... but it is not cross-platform?

I say bunk to that.

I agree that by not running easily on Windows (though there is always CygWin) the adoption rate will not be as high as it could be.

I would disagree that that is a bad thing.

And I would posit that there are probably statistically nearly as many Evo users out there today as Thunderbird. That will change ... but the vast majority of Windows users still use Outlook.

No, I don't have any facts to back up my last paragraph, but at least I know what "cross-platform" means.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[daVinci1980]

God, I totally agree. I would use Evo in a heartbeat if it were available on Windows. (And no, I cannot switch, I develop products for x86/Windows).

To the other poster who suggests that it would not be possible, desirable, or easy to support cross platforms... That's total bunk. I used to develop commercial apps that ran on Windows, Linux, Mac/OS9 and OSX. It *does* require a bit more work, but in practice, it's actually not much more work than supporting one OS.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[LS]

I think you are missing the point. Evolution (with the now free Connector software) can connect with Exchange servers for corporate mail, calendaring, etc. Thunderbird does not do this. In fact, I use Evolution for corporate mail, and Thunderbird for my personal mail. They are two different things, even though there is overlap.

LS

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[Devil]

I have to agree with daVinci1980: I'd love for Evolution to be ported to Windows, even if they only ported part of it (Evo Lite?). I use Thunderbird on both Windows and Linux because it's the only mail client I know of that works seamlessly on both platforms.

However, with Ximian now fully absorbed by Novell, I think the odds of a Windows port of Evo is highly unlikely.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[Electrum]

I used to develop commercial apps that ran on Windows, Linux, Mac/OS9 and OSX. It *does* require a bit more work, but in practice, it's actually not much more work than supporting one OS.

You must mean from an application perspective. Mac OS and Windows have a number of important differences in their UI standards. Sure, you might use a toolkit that lets you just recompile for the Mac, but then you're going to get a Mac application that feels a Windows application. Actually doing a good UI that conforms to the UI standards for each platform takes time.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[daVinci1980]

Actually, no. There are a few places that differ a bit (user experience), but in general, the code just works. The trick is where your toolkit lies. Too close to the underlying APIs, and you're right--the software is for one platform, and simply ported to the other. Too far from the APIs, and you wind up doing everything twice.

Plus, it's open source. If the code worked even partially in a Windows environment, I'd probably donate a few hours a week to making sure that it really behaved on Win32.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[Compenguin]

>Let's see ... Evo runs on Linux, *BSD, Solaris ... probably on OSX if you take the time ... but it is not cross-platform?

And Outlook runs on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windoes XP, probably Windows for Workgroups with win32s and some tweaking, it must be cross platform too.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[Jahf]

No, because the same version of Outlook ends up being the same binary using the same libraries.

Your example would have worked if I was willing to say that [insert app here] were cross-platform because it runs on Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux.

However, I didn't make a claim like that, and if you think that I did or you think that your Win* analogy is legitimate, well ... no point in continuing.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution more featureful?

I installed Fedora 2 about 3 months ago and it came with Evolution, so I thought I'd try it. It is by far the worst pop client I have ever used.

I finally found the disk file where it stores all my outbound mail, but there's no way to create a folder/mailbox for it on the GUI side. You can try to create one, but it winds up as a subfolder and there's no way to delete it without using vi. Eudora 1.0 is a superior mail client.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[lpret]

Check out Sunbird -- Mozilla's infant Calendar program. Based off the iCal standard, it allows for server-based calendar operations, meaning collaboration is a breeze. Althought it's still in 0.2a, it's still pretty good.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

> Mac OS and Windows have a number of important differences in their UI standards.

That's true for Mac. But Unix GUIs generally use Microsoft/IBM UI standards.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[IamTheRealMike]

There was some talk of doing that a few months ago, they appear to want to do it. Also Michael Meeks (a Ximian developer) has been getting into Win32 development lately, though that might be just for OpenOffice.

I think it's something they want to do, but it's a bit non-trivial.

Re:Linux apps on Windows

[robochan]

First off, I'm not a coder, so if I'm talking out my ass, feel free to slap me down for it...

All that aside, YOU ARE a coder.
Quote:
"(And no, I cannot switch, I develop products for x86/Windows)"

You could work on something like this yourself... isn't that the point of Open Source Software? YOU could stop waiting for it and actually do something about it yourself! Don't some of the best/most successful OSS projects available exist due to someone "scratching an itch" like that?
The Evolution Project Pages even provide direct links
to developer info and contributor info. I have no doubt that it would be some sort of monumental undertaking, but hell, if YOU want it - it has to start somewhere. The sources are freely available to you and me and anyone else interested in doing something along those lines.

Like I said before: I'm no coder. Aside from a few handy shell scripts and customizing some application compiles, I'm pretty much of no use in the coding situation, but then again, I'm not the one asking/wishing about if/when it'll happen...

New feature list...

[dmayle]

It wasn't in the new feature list, but Evolution 2.0 is the one that's supposed to include the GPL'ed Exchange connector, as well as support for Novell's mail server (I forget the name.)

Re:New feature list...

[apachetoolbox]

Novell's mail server is called GroupWise. Which is more secure and stable then exchange, not to mention the eDir backend.

Re:New feature list...

[killjoe]

I wonder how hard it would be to take an existing IMAP server and store things like the evolution calender and task list on it.

In the outlook/exchange paradigm outlook does most of the work. Why not do the same thing with evolution?

Re:New feature list...

[kaisyain]

That's exactly what Kolab does.

Re:New feature list...

[widderslainte]

Mdaemon Groupware does. Not free, but relatively cheap.

Re:New feature list...

[SeaGK]

evolution-data-server and the ximian-connector is what you are asking for. Includes support for GroupWise an several other "backends" (like MS-Exchange 2000/2003). They are a bitch to get installed on Debian, but Evolution 2.0 is much .... much better than 1.4.6 (Debian's official version), especially on stability of the exchange connector (Connector 1.4.7 crashes all the time for us), it's faster and looks nicer too.

Re:New feature list...

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

True, but when your organization is already standardized on Exchange, it's nice to be able to talk to the corporate email system ;)

Re:New feature list...

[Anonymous Coward]

The exchange connector has been available for 1.x for a while now (e.g. FreeBSD ports).

The feature I wanted was x509 or pkcs12 cert support instead of PGP. I suppose I'll have to rtfa now.

I use it, like it

[fire-eyes]

I use it, have been for over a week now. Or something.

I find it is significantly faster all around, the interface is cleaned up and feels easier to use.

I haven't experimented with junk mail yet.

The only thing I wish I could do in evolution is have just the email client, I don't use any of that other shit.

I use gentoo as well, so USE=-bullshit would be nice :)

Re:I use it, like it

[idiotnot]

The only thing I wish I could do in evolution is have just the email client, I don't use any of that other shit.

You note the addition of NNTP support? WHY!?

There's already a very good gnome news reader -- it's called Pan. Is it that difficult to just have evolution call the mime handler for news:// ?

Having one big swiss army knife of a program appeals to Windows users. But windows is a distant third on my list of interfaces (I use OSX and Gnome on top of whatever more), and I kind of appreciate small, well-designed applications that work well together.

Re:I use it, like it

[Fred_A]

Wasn't this version supposed to be modular ??

I thought each piece could be run independently. If it's still a huge integrated mess, I think I'll stick with ThunderBird for now.

Re:I use it, like it

[kundor]

If you want small apps that do one thing, you really should be using KDE. Gnome apps tend to be big monolithic things far more often, whereas with KParts, KDE is entirely made of small one-function apps that embed eachother.

Re:I use it, like it

[brainee28]

I found it to be pretty fast, but it took up way too much system resources for me. Too many things running in the background, especially SpamAssassin....it was bogging the rest of my system down. I took it out, and no more slowdowns.

Re:I use it, like it

[johnnyb]

GNOME does the same thing w/ Bonobo.

Re:I use it, like it

[DAldredge]

This is the same PAN that can take up 1 GIG of RAM when retreiving 200,000+ headers in comp.os.linux or related text groups on a high retention server.

It also hasn't been updated sine 2004-01-24.

Re:I use it, like it

[kundor]

There's a difference between creating a model to allow reusable components, and a fundamental design principle. Bonobo is a step in the right direction, but it ends up allowing cooperation between the monoliths, not creating a framework of one-function apps.

Re:I use it, like it

[Anonymous Coward]

yea, it's moderately buggy and a hog. I don't know of anything else on linux that does binaries well, though. Best thing I've used has been xnews (for windows) - course, that's not the most stable or up-to-date thing either. (Why are there so many newsreaders that simply don't support multipart binaries? Don't they want the pirate market?? jeez.)

Re:I use it, like it

[lewp]

I'm pretty sure it's modular in that it's got that backend service thing (what's it called again? evolution-data-server or something?) that the rest of the desktop can take advantage of to get information about contacts, calendars, and such. I wasn't aware of it ever becoming more modular than that.

Re:I use it, like it

[NutscrapeSucks]

Simple NNTP functionality makes sense because it can be used for "Groupware" type stuff like discussions, file libraries, "shared folders", etc.

Most dedicated newsreaders are overkill for average users, with extremely complicated and confusing GUIs, and features that corporate users would rather NOT have (scoring, leeching, etc).

Re:I use it, like it

[wojci2]

"The only thing I wish I could do in evolution is have just the email client, I don't use any of that other shit."

Try Sylpheed, http://sylpheed.good-day.net/.
From their FAQ:
(http://sylpheeddoc.sourceforge.net/en/faq/faq-1.h tml#ss1.2)
* Quick response
* Graceful, and sophisticated interface
* Easy configuration, intuitive operation
* Abundant features

I stopped using evolution when I realized that others applications can start in about one second and only run in one process.
/wojci

Re:I use it, like it

[IamTheRealMike]

Random bits embedding each other tends to lead to a a rather messy UI. "Modularity" is not an end itself, it's a means to an end, something that KDE people seem to forget sometimes.

Re:I use it, like it

[Fred_A]

I'm not sure where I saw that, it's a memory from a developper blog which, iirc, was linked from slashdot. It seemed to say that components could be run on their own.

Well I'll still give it a try... I used Evolution a lot already, maybe this version will make me switch back :)

Re:I use it, like it

[johnnyb]

I disagree. Nautilus is actually just a conglomeration of applications that work together. Same with evolution.

Any Chance of

[mwagner_00]

Getting this ported to Windows??? I know alot more people would be using it if they did that.

Re:Any Chance of

[Noksagt]

Not as good as native, but 1.4 (maybe higher too) seems to run [ntwizards.net] on cygwin.

Re:Any Chance of

[daeley]

On a related note, Mac OS X users can obtain Evolution via Fink and run it in X11.

Re:Any Chance of

[generic-man]

We can?

Macrocosm:~ jweill$ sudo fink install evolution
Information about 1871 packages read in 1 seconds.
Failed: Can't resolve dependency "db31 (>= 3.1.17-9)" for package "evolution-1.4.6-10" (no matching packages/versions found)

Re:Any Chance of

[JohnnyGTO]

Might be better to port Windows users to Linux :-)

Re:Any Chance of

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Not quite Evolution, but these guys are working on getting Gnome2 ported to Cygwin.

MS Outlook is decent, but it really lacks basic features that should exist in any modern Email/PIM application-- Real message threads, proper message quoting when I reply-to or forward an email message, Todo items which show up in your Calendar, Group contacts which show up in my own Contact list...

Re:Any Chance of

[daeley]

Yes, we can.

Re:Any Chance of

[daeley]

Might be better to port Windows users to Linux :-)

Nah, too unstable. ;)

Re:Any Chance of

[Anonymous Coward]

Might be better to port Windows users to Linux :-)

Nah, too unstable. ;)

What, Windows users or Linux? ;)

Re:Any Chance of

[Doc Ruby]

Those are the 1.x versions of Evolution. We're talking about the 2.0 version. Good luck.

Re:Any Chance of

[generic-man]

Well, I can't because Fink doesn't provide one of the required dependencies. The required dependency, db31, is only satisfied by switching to the "unstable" CVS/rsync distribution.

So no, Mac OS X users can't enjoy Evolution 2.0, or even 1.4 without jumping through a hoop or two.

Re:Any Chance of

[daeley]

You are right, I should have been more specific.

Re:Any Chance of

[JohnnyGTO]

Hahahahah!! snort! snort! coffee ---->>> jetting out nose....

Re:Any Chance of

[GreyWolf3000]

Evolution binaries should link to db31 statically.

In my opinion, software should only link dynamically if they can expect the library to already be present.

Re:Any Chance of

[ce25254]

You mean like linking statically to Microsoft's GDI+ JPEG library because it isn't in the standard distro of every MS-Windows OS?

Hmmm...
I'm not a MS-Windows fan, but people were just saying the opposite of your post over in the JPEG Virus threads...

Re:Any Chance of

[GreyWolf3000]

libjpeg is a pretty common library and I believe it should be always linked to dynamically. If libjpeg were around only because some other package (and really no other) depended upon it, it would then be best to link to it statically.

Re:Any Chance of

[Deslack]

And have multiple copies of the same function in the memory (if you tend to run >1 copies of Evolution at one time.) No, thank YOU!

Coral Cache

[bbotbuilder]

here

Night Owls

[m0rph3us0]

2) Alarms don't work properly if Evolution runs past midnight

Yeah. That is such an uncommon situation. I can't imagine the lack of forethought that went into the code to allow that bug to ship for a major version release.

Re:Night Owls

[Frizzle Fry]

They neglected to mention that it also has problems if you expose it to bright light and will unexpectedly fork(2) if you get it wet.

Re:Night Owls

[Anonymous Coward]

+1, Gremlins reference

Re:Night Owls

[Frizzle Fry]

Btw, if you (I'm not sure whom exactly I'm addressing here) haven't checked out the "film-maker's commentary" track (not the actors' commentary) on the Gremlins dvd, you really should. It's worth renting the movie just for that. At the start of every scene that uses puppets (which is most scenes in the movie), you can here genuine anguish in their voices as they recall filming the scene. The commentary is the always the same and gets funnier every time:
Oh no, remember this scene?
This was a nightmare to film!
It took us nine weeks to film this. [The scene is about about twelve seconds long.]
This entire rooms is on top of a platform with a trap door. Below we had eighty-three pupeteers in an eight cubic foot box. They were allowed no food or water until be finished shooting the scene.

The only exceptions are when they stop to celebrate because the current scene involves no puppets (they do this about five times) and when they point out that the dog is by far the best actor in the movie (they do this about three times) because other than Corey Feldman he was the only one who thought the puppets as were real and reacted to them as such.

Re:Night Owls

[Malawar]

+5 Imaginary Funny Points.

In case screenshot site slashdotted...

[Anonymous Coward]

Open your e-mail client. Pull down every available menu. Select compose. Pull down every availble menu. Bring up prefrences. Select every tab.

Ooooh. Aaaaah.

Groupwise

[Anonymous Coward]

EOM

_some_ screenshots

[Laxitive]

OSDir.com Apps Slideshow Back [ 2 of 84 ] Next

84? Yeah I suppose some people might refer to that as "some screenshots". May I suggest
"A fuck of a lot" as an alternate quantifier?

:)

-Laxitive

Re:_some_ screenshots

[darekana]

I'm just glad they got some shots of the About Box and Quick Reference screens.

I never touch programs that don't have a solid about box design.

Re:_some_ screenshots

[Vaevictis666]

Also, gotta love how they captured not only every drop-down menu, but even multiple submenus too... I mean come on people...

Re:_some_ screenshots

[_xeno_]

I loved watching the color of the e-mail address in the From and To fields change in each screenshot.

It starts off blue, becomes black, then changes to green, then back to a dark blue, then bright blue again...

I can only assume their screenshot program has... issues.

Re:_some_ screenshots

[FUF]

Actually, It's refreshing to actually see 'extensive' screenshots of software.. most people do a half-assed job of just a single shot or two. It's nice to see a change IMHO :)

Re:_some_ screenshots

[glitch23]

84? Yeah I suppose some people might refer to that as "some screenshots". May I suggest "A fuck of a lot" as an alternate quantifier?

You may suggest it if you wish but it still doesn't mean a thing to me, not to mention that it shows your immaturity by having to swear to get your point acrossed. Just MY suggestion.

Ximian Exchange Connector

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Anyone know if the Exchange Connector will work with this? I doubt it since the connector only works with 1.4 right now but you never know...

Re:Ximian Exchange Connector

[bryhhh]

The answer to that appears to be in one of TFA's

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/evolution/2 .0/evolution-2.0.0.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnome.org/pu b/gnome/sources/gtkhtml/3.2 /gtkhtml-3.2.1.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gn ome/sources/gal/2.2/gal -2.2.1.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sour ces/evolution-d ata-server/1.0/evolution-data-server-1.0.0.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/sources/libsoup/2. 2 /libsoup-2.2.0.tar.gz
http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gn ome/sources/ximian-conn ector/2.0/ximian-connector-2.0.0.tar.gz

Re:Ximian Exchange Connector

[daemonc]

Not only will it work, but it is now included with Evolution, GPLed, and free of charge.

Re:Ximian Exchange Connector

[jjr23]

But will the exchange connector connect to Exchange 5.5? The last version I saw only works with Exchange 2000 and later. :(

Re:Ximian Exchange Connector

[CerebusUS]

It works, I'm using the connector with both the 1.4 Evolution client and the 2.0 client.

The 1.4 client is running on my workstation in the office, Fedora Core 2, connects to our exchange 2003 servers without an issue. Everything seems to be available: contacts, schedules, free/busy times, public folder, etc.

I just set up the 2.0 client tonight on my home machine, Fedora Core 3 Test 2, connecting to the same Exchange server. Seems to work just fine as well.

It uses WebDAV and the Outlook Web Access services, but provides a far better experience than webmail would :-)

spellchecker

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it still have that awfully clunky spellchecker, or have they updated it to replicate what others have been doing for years?

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

wtf is evolution?

Ironically, it's email client for zeaolots.

Document the EDS!!

[IGnatius T Foobar]

All this new configurability and extensibility in Evo 2.0 is great, but what I'd really like to see is some better documentation for the "Evolution Data Server" (basically the Camel and Wombat API's). Ximian/Novell are hoping that the community will be excited about writing "snap-ins" to extend Evo's functionality, but what about those of us who would like to, for example, connect it to other back-end data stores? There's a "connector" for Groupwise and a "connector" for Exchange ... what if I want to write a "connector" for some other groupware server? (I'm asking this question because I do want to do exactly that.) These API's are barely documented. You have to reverse-engineer the existing connector code to get anything done with it. I'd like to see some real docs.

Re:Document the EDS!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point... I take it you've brought this up with the Ximian/Novell guys on the evo mailing list. They really do want feedback on stuff like this.

Also New Feature: Summary Removed

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I glad that there is now Kontact new on the playground.

"Eugenia"

[Gothmolly]

Christ, its like she's Linus or Madonna. OSSpews is just a blog, get over it, and maybe it will get over itself.

Re:"Eugenia"

[Anonymous Coward]

What's even funnier is to pull a Eugenia-style Carnivore routine, and put random phrases like, oh, say, 'BeOS' in the signature of every message you post to any mailing list you've ever seen a message from her on. If five or six frequent posters were to do this, she'd go nuts.

Not ready for release?

[linuxtelephony]

I'm really disappointed. It seems they were in such a rush to release 2.0.0 with Gnome 2.8.0 that they left a pretty glaring problem.

From their Known Issues: 2) Alarms don't work properly if Evolution runs past midnight

That's a pretty fundamental flaw for a program that is supposed to be essentially an Outlook replacement.

I commend Novell for their overall Linux efforts, but rushing things to release for the sake of making a date with this type of flaw seems like a dangerous way to conduct business.

It is things just like this that give some people enough pause to NOT deploy open source solutions. What was the earlier /. article about switching from Linux to Windows saying? Problems with programs, support, etc? Releasing a "stable" 2.0.0, exiting the beta 1.5.x series, and having a problem that prevents alarms from working properly if you leave Evolution running overnight certainly doesn't make me very confident.

Hopefully 2.0.1 will be released VERY soon.

Re:Not ready for release?

[myc_lykaon]

That's a pretty fundamental flaw for a program that is supposed to be essentially an Outlook replacement.

Have you tried making appointments in Outlook for a date in BST while you are in GMT? It's a matter of luck if anyone turns up to the meeting. Time zone changing in a country as you move from summer to winter time? - Naaaah, never happens.

Re:Not ready for release?

[Doc Ruby]

I haven't found alarms in Evo1.5 to work properly, either, so I've ignored them. But I've used the rest of the program. I like that option, weighing my own priorities. Just because they released it doesn't mean you have to use it, but if they' don't release it, you can't. I'm also waiting for the 2.0.1 release, but meanwhile, I'm using 2.0.0.

Re:Not ready for release?

[fcw]

Time zone changing in a country as you move from summer to winter time? - Naaaah, never happens.

Well, where I live, midnight is a lot more frequent.

Re:Not ready for release?

[Anonymous Coward]

Duh, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Now quit working past midnight. Leave some glory for us procrastinators in the morning.

Re:Not ready for release?

[ajs]

If you're rushing out the door and grabbing x.org 6.8.0, gnome 2.8.0 and evolution 2.0.0 in order to get all the nifty new features, and you don't expect there to be problems, you're being VERY unrealistic.

The goal of the "release early, release often" mentality is to get the community involved in finding and solving problems.

If you can't tollerate a few bugs, that's fine. People like that make up most of the world after all. We call that an "end user" and end-users can wait for distributions to finish kicking the tires and doing the integration work.

Myself, I'd rather have 2.0.0 out in a feature-complete state so that I can get bugs in early (and maybe even a fix or two) ahead of my favorite distro releasing it in the state that I'll have to end up using at work.

Re:Not ready for release?

[nunb]

Well, while they're at it maybe they should fix the fields-over-buttons stuff for the 2.0.1 release...

the limits of evolution

[ed1park]

anyone happen to know how much email+attachments evolution can hold? I support users with Outlook PST files that easily get in the 2-3 GB range, and they prefer to archive as little as possible.

Re:the limits of evolution

[DraKKon]

I don't know how evelotuon works now, but previous versions didn't store all of the users email and data in ONE fscking file. I seem to remember that each "folder" had it's on file, similar to imap setups, so, in theory Evolution can how a LOT more data than Outlook. But Like I said, this is before version 1.4... Evolution took too long to load on my p400 so I stick with mutt..

Re:the limits of evolution

[alexborges]

Doesnt work like that. Evo supports standards.

You can use mbox storage (i think its the default) and that can probably go to a couple of gigs, no prob.

But for real scalability (i am like at 5 gigs), you can use the maildir store. No problem, evo supports both. Anyhow, you should be using imap which really obviates the question in itself (its the problem of the server to manage large mailboxes then).

Re:the limits of evolution

[value_added]

Not really sure what you're asking, but if you're wondering how the size of the Outlook data files compare with standard mbox, I'd estimate they're 40% larger. Email messages (w/or w/o large attachments) doesn't have to be stored in a single file.

Dude, where's my space?

[BruderTux]

Evolution looks nice indeed, but who thought of this stupid buttons below the mailfolders?

Being able to access contacts and so on is nice, but it wastes a lot of space in an area where you'll need space most.

So the obvious question is:
How to disable this new component buttons and/or revert to the old GUI style?

Re:Dude, where's my space?

[stubear]

"Evolution looks nice indeed, but who thought of this stupid buttons below the mailfolders?"

Who though of this? Microsoft of course. You thought Evolution was an innovative product? Think again. It's a direct copy of Outlook.

Re:Dude, where's my space?

[hattig]

Except that Microsoft's version actually looks good, not clunky, and has laid out the window in a decent way for the standard monitor format that people have. The buttons are clear and not too large. The entries are compact and readable.

I hate outlook because it has too many quirks, hopefully Evolution is not copying these as well. Outlook preferences are terrible. Then again, that's what happens when you create such a functional application.

The Evolution and Gnome people have a very long way to go.They'll get there one day I'm sure.

Re:Dude, where's my space?

[JockAMundo]

The one reason I use Evo is the virtual folders. I have about 30 different virtual folders, making it easy to search for mail from a specific person/company or on a specific subject. This feature makes it stand head and sholders above all other mail clients I've used. (I know M2 has virtual folders too, but M2 is buggy as hell).

Outlook has nothing even approaching this functionality. Evo may share some eye candy, but underneath it is a very different beast. Ever try and pull from two different IMAP servers with Outlook? I did, and it toasted the entire MSOffice install!

Re:Dude, where's my space?

[drsmithy]

Outlook has nothing even approaching this functionality.

Outlook 2003 has search folders, which are the same thing (at least in my usage of both). Trouble is they only work with an Exchange server (and maybe locally PST-stored mail) :(.

Evo may share some eye candy, but underneath it is a very different beast. Ever try and pull from two different IMAP servers with Outlook? I did, and it toasted the entire MSOffice install!

Outlook sucks at IMAP (for many non-obvious reasons as well, like where it puts the local mail cache), even Outlook Express is better. It's tolerable for POP3 usage, but really it's morphed into - and only meant to be - a client for Exchange.

Re:Dude, where's my space?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kontact also supports search folders, and has since before Outlook.

Outlook rip-off

[Mwongozi]

OK, this isn't meant to be a flame, I hate Microsoft as much as the next guy, but...

The layout of that window on the screenshots is almost identical to Outlook 2003, right down to the buttons in the bottom left and the search bar at the top.

Open source shouldn't content itself with stealing good ideas, that's Microsoft's job. Surely we can come up with something innovative, and I'm not using the Microsoft definition.

Re:Outlook rip-off

[PhilipPeake]

So why was the parent marked redundant? He asks a very good question - Really, why is there so little innovation in Open source? There is lots and lots of partial re-implementation of existing stuff, usually not quite as good or complete as the thing they are copying, but very, very little which is new and exciting. Brushing questions like this under the carpet by simply moderating them as redundant is not the answer.

Re:Outlook rip-off

[Phleg]

If I recall, this was innovative when they first came up with the idea several years ago, in order to distance themselves from Outlook. Once again, it would be Microsoft that took the idea, not Evolution.

Re:Outlook rip-off

[dash2]

It was marked redundant because someone made the exact same point a couple of posts up.

Re:Outlook rip-off

[be-fan]

Jesus Christ, who barfed on that monitor? Is that the Outlook 2003 default theme? God, I thought only Visio was broken enough to use that. Did the entire QA department at MS get their eyes gouged out or something?

Re:Outlook rip-off

[earlytime]

do you really want to know?

it's beacuse that's how most progress is made, in very small increments. Linux was born to be incrementally better than minix, then made to be incrementally than *ix, then *ix, and so on. Now Linux is arguably the best unix out there (depends on your needs). A good side effect of open source code, is that anybody can make small changes that improve the overall package. Over time, these small moves add up to a huge advance over the original.
Apache is a perfect example, it was not just an incremental improvement, but originally a straight copy of ncsa; take all those little patches, and package them into one tarball. Ok, it's not spectacular, but it's better than ncsa. Continue this process over 9 years, and you have not just the most popular, but an extremely stable, lightweight and portable web server.
It's rare that you see a major development, especially within a specific area. Consider the fact that even software powerhouses like microsoft, sun & orace are all focused on developing new iterations of old ideas ( vms, unix, SQL). These three products/technologies are at least 20 years old, yet they still drive the software industry. Even Intel is milking a 30 year old product, the integrated microprocessor.

refs:
http://www.computerhope.com/history/unix. htm
http://www.economist.com/science/tq/displaySt ory.c fm?story_id=2724348
http://www.apache.org/foundat ion/faq.html#what
http://www.oracle.com/technolog y/oramag/oracle/03- may/o33drdba.html
http://inventors.about.com/libr ary/weekly/aa092998 .htm

Re:Outlook rip-off

[Photon Ghoul]

Do you have any links to back this up? I'm geniunely curious and not just trying to call you out on something.

Re:Outlook rip-off

[spectecjr]

If I recall, this was innovative when they first came up with the idea several years ago, in order to distance themselves from Outlook. Once again, it would be Microsoft that took the idea, not Evolution.

Outlook 95 - released in, unsurprisingly, 1995 - has the GUI that Evolution has today. Evolution wasn't even started until 1999. The first version copied the Outlook 98 GUI down to the letter.

Later versions include the Outlook 2000 Dashboard features.

Evolution 1.4.6 (the version before today's released version) still looks exactly like Outlook 2000. And not at all like the copy of Outlook 2003 that Evolution 2.0 looks like.

1.4.6 screenshot

Outlook 2000 with Dashboard

Re:Outlook rip-off

[Phleg]

Actually, I may be wrong. Looking into some mailing list history, it appears the new design for Evolution 2.0 came about in July 2003. Outlook 2003's beta was released in July 2003, as I recall.

Re:Outlook rip-off

[Anonymous Coward]

Relax. Just imagine how bad it would be if not for Apple (Mail.app) or Mozilla Foundation (T'bird) to show them how crowded and noisy MSFT's lousy interfaces are.

Re:Outlook rip-off

[ChaosDiscord]

Open source shouldn't content itself with stealing good ideas, that's Microsoft's job.

First, and perhaps most importantly, if Evolution doesn't look very similar to Outlook, many Outlook users will look at it and immediately dismiss it as low quality. Even if the interface easy to use for new users while being powerful and efficient for power users, many users fear any change. By borrowing Outlook's look, Evolution can attract more users.

Second, as you say, Outlook's interface is a "good idea." Sure, it can be improved, but it's not a bad place to start. If you're going to replace it, it darn well needs to better, not just different (see point the first). Start with something good, then incrementally improve. Wholesale overhauls are almost always a bad idea; it's hard to tell if you've really improved anything until you've spend large numbers of hours working on it.

So I'm not worrying about it too much right now. Give it some time to get comfortable (despite the version number, in the grand scheme of things Evolution is relatively new) before it gets bold.

Re:Outlook rip-off

[4of12]

Open source shouldn't content itself with stealing good ideas

No, but it's a good way to start. Rejecting ideas because they were NIH is a bad way to start.

Plus, it paves the migration path to the point where Windows users have an easier time on modern Linux desktops than I do, having spent signficant sentences suffering under twm, CDE, etc. on UNIX systems.

When I need help with OpenOffice on my Linux box at home, I ask my wife, who uses Word on Windows.

Taking advantage of the built-in bias of computer training towards Microsoft products is a good strategy for recruiting converts.

But at what cost?

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be great for folks to realize that writing apps cross-platform is one of the single best ways to get TONS of adoption, and ease any eventual transitions to Linux.

Yes, but as OS's (like OS/2 fer instance) found out, having that application compatibility can be a double edged sword. You might ease the transition, but you also potentially negate one of the motivating factors as well as providing your competition (i.e. MS) with a marketing edge (why switch because you can still run your "free" apps on Windows) and (Windows has tons of Windows only apps, PLUS it'll run the open source apps that count).

Re:But at what cost?

[GreyWolf3000]

First of all, shame on the mods who slapped 'troll' on you for not conforming to slashthink.

So instead you want people to make this choice:

Windows - Everything you already use
Linux - Has none of the apps you already use

Looks like the decision is a no brainer to me.

Not really. Say Apache didn't run on Windows. Say Firefox didn't run on Windows. Say Gimp couldn't be run on Windows.

There are plenty more examples that support just the opposite of your argument--that Linux has everything you use, and Windows has nothing that you use.

I can write .pdf documents in Linux. Without paying Adobe 500$. Pretty cool, huh?

Re:But at what cost?

[aussie_a]

And I can write them in Windows without paying Adobe 500$. Pretty cool, huh?

Oh, and by the way, you put the $ in front of the amount in America, Australia and Canada (one of those is most likely where you're from).

Re:It's sunday afternoon and you're reading slashd

[WebCowboy]

...and you posted this on Monday afternoon.

Are you the same guy who posted this, but posting anonymously?

Cygwin!

[Noksagt]

Oops! Here's the linky

Re:Cygwin!

[Spoing]

I don't believe it. Every 6 months I get excited when someone mentions Evolution for Windows being used somewhere...but when I look I'm disappointed.

Just now, I've searched the web for 2 hours and have come up with no other references except for a few comments on cobbled together copies a few people have been able to comple for themselves. None seem to be used for anything practical at this time, though.

In my searching, I found no packages for the X or Gnome-specific branchs of Cygwin. No stand-alone ports. Nothing in the main Cygwin package repositories. No binaries of any sort. No directions for compiling it from scratch or in part let alone 'just compile it from source after installing Cygwin'. Not even a short 'it works, but you have to build, configure, and install A, B, and C versions 1, 2, and 3'. Nothing. Silence.

The only thing that looks remotely promising is Evolution for Windows -- and that project started three days ago.

Re:Cygwin!

[wizrd_nml]

No offense to the parent but please don't mod all these Cygwin posts up!!

Repeat after me: Running Evolution under Cygwin is NOT A WINDOWS PORT!!! Very very few people will fire up Cygwin and then Evolution every time they want to check their mail. Not to mention the effort required to install which Windows users are not used to.

A Windows port means it runs natively in Windows. Period.

Re:Cygwin!

[Noksagt]

No offense taken, but I wish you had read my prior post or that I didn't mess it up. The great grandparent post (in which I screwed up the link) is explicit that it is not a native port and that it wouldn't be as good as a native port. The whole subthread on running under OS X is not about a windows port either (though it has been modded down for being Evolution 1.x rather than 2)!

The original poster said "I know alot more people would be using it if they did that." If the Cygwin version runs fast enough, I see absolutely no reason people wouldn't run it. Many /.ers already have cywin loaded much of the time for their working environment. Furthermore, you don't always have to fire up cygwin or even install it to use software ported to it. As long as install files have access to the correct dlls, you can often run them as if using any other program. (Note that this would probably take considerably more work in this case if it is even possible--it requires the overhead of an X-server and a lot of the gnome libraries.)

Just because there only appears to be a cygwin port doesnt mean that this information isn't helpful or useful to some. I don't know how useful or interesting my post was (I haven't seen any instructions on actually getting it running & it is just a screenshot of the splash screen), but many of the cygwin posts are at least interesting. Seems like a good enough to mod up some of those posts to me.

Re:Cygwin!

[lphuberdeau]

Reminds me of Rational packaging Rational Rose with wine as a Linux port...

Kmail

[thinkliberty]

One of the things i like about kmail is that Gnupg is intgrated in to it. Does Evolution support this?

Re:Kmail

[KeyserDK]

Yes, not inline(!) though. Which most other mailers seem to use.

Re:Kmail

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, 2.0 supports both approaches - the Security menu allows you to select either PGP (same as 1.4) or S/MIME.

Re:KMail

[monkeySauce]

I would have to agree, and I'll add that Kontact is a very nice Evolution replacement.

I had been using Evolution (1.4) for some time (1.5 years?) and generally liked it. I installed 2.0 and I was really disappointed. Evo 1.4 would crash occasionally on me, and I was dissapointed that 2.0 continued this annoying behavoir. Even more frustrating were they incredible delays I saw in manipulating mail on my imap server. I hoped these problems would dissapear with 2.0 but they did not. Add to this the fact that I, like others, was underwhelmed by the new UI and color scheme, and suddenly I was in the market for a new PIM.

As a KDE user, the natural first step was to give Kontact/Kmail a try. I've barely been using it a week and I've fallen in love. It syncs with my palm V, just like Evo, I find it to be more customizable than Evolution was, and so far it hasn't crashed. So far I have liked every aspect of Kontact as well or better than the Evolution equivalent. Best of all, mail operations on my IMAP server as fast as ever, like they should be. I don't know WTF is wrong with Evo's IMAP support but Kontact/Kmail did it right, and I'm now a convert. So long Evolution!

Re:KMail

[Anonymous Coward]

As a KDE user who recently switched to GNOME, I report exactly the opposite experience. I was a KDE user for years (across a few machines and distros), and decided to try out GNOME... and was just blown away by it. Evo was a revelation compared to KMail... although I'd got used to KMail over the years, I realised just how much I'd been baby-sitting and working around its many problems and crasher bugs. The IMAP and calendar support in Evo is light-years ahead of Kmail for compatiblity (even though it used to be a bit slow). KMail was fine for simple pop3 sutff, but anything remotely "enterprise-ish" and it fell apart badly.

Not to bash my old faithful friend, but you couldn't pay me enough to switch back to KDE and Kmail -- and that's also been the experience of everyone I've told about GNOME and Evolution.

Re:Kmail

[CoolVibe]

It does nowadays with kde 3.3

Re:KMail

[Taladar]

The only thing that really sucks with KMail is that you have to install half of KDE to use it. I am sure I am not the only one who does not use KDE as Desktop (I use XFCE4) and wants to use this. So please KDE-Developers get a clue and use a new packaging scheme with one package per KDE-Application.

Re:Kmail

[lidocaineus]

Inline? Who uses Gnu/PGP inline?

Me

[raquelita]

I had tried to use Evolution but i leave it beacuse of NNTP. For me is easier to read the newsgrups at the same time that i read my email. Plus, my College has an autentificated NNTP server and a lot of those NNTP readers on the WWW doesn't support autetification.

GroupWise Client Support Added

[_Bunny]

It appears that Evolution 2.0 adds some aupport for Novell's mail system, GroupWise.

There's an article in this month's Novell Connection Magazine on how to set it up, complete with a bunch of screen shots.

Novell added support to run the GroupWise backend on Linux recently (late last year or early this year, I can't remember). In fact, most of the GroupWise servers this year at Brainshare were running Linux instead of NetWare!

- Bunny

Looking at the screenshots

[hattig]

It looks quite clunky.

Disclaimer: I like having different applications do different things, and launch each other as necessary. I dislike the BigBlobOfFunctionality(tm) approach to software. I understand that PHBs like BigBlobOfFunctionality because they don't have to learn what the minimise button does.

The compose-email dialog looked like Word 6. Seriously, is there any need for something so clunky? I hope it has a simple option in the preferences, a single click "Optimised Interface" setting that removes unnecessary cruft, auto-sets Plain Text everywhere, makes things secure, ...

The list of folders was minimal. It seemed more important to have massive buttons to access various bits of functionality within Evolution for some reason. I hope you can get rid of these, or move them onto a vertically tabbed sidebar or something.

I haven't used it, so I don't know how it performs. Hopefully it should be fine.

Re:Looking at the screenshots

[hattig]

Argh! The Calendar has the dreaded "Right Click -> New Appointment/Meeting/Task/..." issue.

I want to click and type in the calendar. That is a basic usability issue. If I can't do that, I'll never use it. Click, Type, drag top or bottom of entry to set duration. Simple.

Re:Looking at the screenshots

[Hobadee]

Disclaimer: I like having different applications do different things, and launch each other as necessary. I dislike the BigBlobOfFunctionality(tm) approach to software. I understand that PHBs like BigBlobOfFunctionality because they don't have to learn what the minimise button does.

I agree. However, one thing I don't like is when programs are TOO fragmented. The programs themselves should remain separate, but the data should all be in the same place, so that all the apps can access and use it in conjunction. (ie: You want a program to manage all your contacts, but you want your email program to be able to get the email addresses of them, and your SIP phone to get their phone numbers.)

Re:Looking at the screenshots

[hattig]

I agree totally with this.

At least on Windows the excellent desktop calendar/todo list application Rainlendar can integrate with Outlook's database, and soon iCal.

KDE used to be good as well. KAddressBook or whatever it was called was used by a lot of applications. I wonder if it was updated to hold IM details as well for the KDE IM application. Now they're going all integrated like Evolution though - I hope the individual applications will continue to exist alongside (using the same data, of course!).

Re:Looking at the screenshots

[Hobadee]

On a similar note (slightly offtopic)...

I have always liked databases (MySQL/PHP!). They are very well orginized if you do em right, you can cross reference stuff easily (JOIN's) and you can find stuff easily. Why don't we see applications using databases more? If they did, they wouldn't have to worry about file format and other annoyances like that. (Column names, yes, but it would be easy to standardize that - how many different names can you come up with for the field "last name"?) I would love to be able to run a SQL on my machine all the time that just served information to different programs. I could also then write my own web front-ends for them. So like I said - why haven't more people thought of this?

Re:Looking at the screenshots

[ProfFalcon]

Disclaimer: I like having different applications do different things, and launch each other as necessary. I dislike the BigBlobOfFunctionality(tm) approach to software. I understand that PHBs like BigBlobOfFunctionality because they don't have to learn what the minimise button does.

Your PHB learned what the minimize button does? Mine just launches 15 copies of everything. Outlook is not on top? Launch another!

Re:Looking at the screenshots

[hattig]

Excellent idea. I'd support actually a common API for accessing the information in a layer above the implementation however.

But yes, as most Linux/FreeBSD distros ship with a database of some sort, I don't see why they can't arrange to use one as a centralised data repository for these applications. Doesn't Exchange use MSSQL?

You'd have to get past the multi-user aspect I suppose :) Does MySQL support non-centralised database tables yet? Can I have a per-user repository in ~/.data yet?

Now all it needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Are the fab5 to bring it some looks and style. What a butt-ugly email client :-|

Spamassisin Integration??

[Lispy]

What does that mean? Does that mean they just added some shiny buttons to it that do the filtering work automatically or did they *include* spam-assassin?

I am not totally clueless since I am running Evo 2.0 for about a week now but so far I couldn't get it to filter any junk. Can anyone clarify this issue?

Re:Spamassisin Integration??

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to check your preferences.

Re:Spamassisin Integration??

[Lispy]

It is activated. Should it filter without any further spamassassin installation?

Re:Spamassisin Integration??

[Anonymous Coward]

AFAIK you need to have spamassassin installed on your system.

For me, "integrated" spam blocking would be something like Thunderbird, this seems more like plug-in spam blocking.

6 download components?

[simetra]

This is what bugs me about installing Linux apps... the ASSLOAD of separate stuffs you have to download, configure, build/install. Why not just bundle everything up nicely? OpenOffice manages to do this.

BTW., anyone else notice that newegg.com has been dead for a few hours?

Re:6 download components?

[ScrewMaster]

BTW., anyone else notice that newegg.com has been dead for a few hours?

Damn, so it is. "Invalid URL" error. That sucks ... I have a couple of orders I'd like to check on. At least it's not a 404 or DNS failure. Maybe they're just updating their site (I hope.)

Re:6 download components?

[noselasd]

>This is what bugs me about installing Linux apps... the ASSLOAD of
>separate stuffs you have to download, configure, build/install. Why not
>just bundle everything up nicely?

Diffrent people diffrent roles. The folks here code, and give the source code to the world. It's up to someone else(such as e.g. your distro vendor) to package and make it install/work nicely. If noone has done that yet, well, there isn't that much to do about it.

Re:6 download components?

[4of12]

Why not just bundle everything up nicely?

Why not indeed!

If the Ximian Red Carpet or rpm binary update thing isn't your style, you might want to take a look at garnome.

Re:6 download components?

[upsidedown_duck]

Why not just bundle everything up nicely?

Without the dozens of interdependent components, GNOME just wouldn't be GNOME.

Re:6 download components?

[damiam]

Funny, I'd never noticed that there's anything more to installing it than "apt-get install evolution". Maybe you should switch to a distro with a decent package manager.

Re:6 download components?

[Turmio]

This is what bugs me about installing Linux apps... the ASSLOAD of separate stuffs you have to download, configure, build/install.
That's why you as a regular Linux desktop user wait until your favourite distribution starts to ship the app and do the downloading, configuring, building and installing for you.

Re:6 download components?

[ajs]

You are an "end user", my friend. This means that you should be letting others do the integration work (as others have replied).

That said, if you want to play around with it, I would suggest that you download garnome. That will build all of the current Gnome pieces on which Evolution relies and give you a starting point WITHOUT destroying your existing installation. It takes a LONG time, because it does this from source (ala BSD ports tree), but by default it installs the result in a user area. Once you do that, simply re-download evolution and build/install it under the garnome tree.

Bible Belt

[Performaman]

I told a Southern Baptist friend about this, and she said I was going to hell.

Re:Bible Belt

[Anonymous Coward]

What moron moderator modded this as "offtopic". It's a joke you twat!

Re:Bible Belt

[MasterLordSatan]

Take comfort, most Baptists are first in line. :)

Re:Bible Belt

[Anonymous Coward]

What moron moderator modded this flamebait?

Re:Bible Belt

[Anonymous Coward]

"What moron moderator modded this flamebait?"

Probably a stupid hell bound Bible thumper trying to please their imaginary god.

Screenshots

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it me or are these screenshots of poor quality? It's of pretty poor form and presentation in general to show such low quality images.

Great news... but does it sync with PocketPC?

[B5_geek]

Yes, I know MS is evil but I have a pocketPC.

I have tried getting SynCE http://synce.sourceforge.net/synce/ to work in the past with various mail clients on kde & Gnome (various distros too).

But I have never had any luck getting it to run. Does anybody know of any other app that will let you synce (preferable) evolution with a pocketpc running MS Mobile 20003?

evolution of evolution

[OffTheLip]

Not sure how much new ground is covered here. spamassassin support can be added to 1.4. nntp, do we need another Outlook Express clone? Web calendering has possibilities but Exchange has a significant lead. I use Evolution 1.4 daily and it does what a email client should, as long as the mail server is not running Exchange.

Winsplo loser

[lothrids]

It would seem that some people hate the idea that a Linux product is challaging the grasp Winsplo has on the market. ALl I can say is CRY ON puck....

yawn!

[jls332]

Outlook 2003 is so far ahead of this program, it's really not even funny. I think it's kind of lame that it looks just like outlook express---like years ago. *yawn*

DOA?

[Doc Ruby]

Evolution 2.0 is part of GNOME 2.8, both new releases in the past week. So now would seem like a good time to upgrade both. And Debian itself is within spitting distance of releasing Sarge, its first major upgrade in about 2 years. So upgrading the whole thing ought to get a machine right on top of the product lifecycle. But how do I do that?

I tried the new debian-installer iso (CD image). Broken package dependencies aborted the "Desktop environment" install. And I couldn't resolve them for upgrading to G2.8/E2.0: hacking sources.list with experimental and sarge repositories, using aptitude, using garnome... It's a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

How does a new user stand a chance installing a spanking new Debian/GNOME/Evolution desktop? Such an exercise should be trivial, grandma-proof. Instead, it's a chore, only for the initiated, and those upgrading from snapshots. That's a hobbyist toy, not a vehicle for world domination.

Re:DOA?

[daemonc]

How does a new user stand a chance installing a spanking new Debian/GNOME/Evolution desktop?

Debian is great and all, for servers, and hard-core advanced users, but why in the HELL would a "new user" be using Debian?!?!

I would recommend new users that want Gnome 2.8 and Evolution 2.0 wait for Fedora Core 3 to be released, or if they are daring, try the test release.

Re:DOA?

[Doc Ruby]

New users want new features and bugfixes, too. That's why all these Linux improvements are prereleases until they're packaged to install for the broad market.

Re:DOA?

[Dirk van der Broek]

Gnome 2.8 and Evo 2.0 are in Debian's experimental archive at the moment. This archive is not meant for use by new users, it's marked EXPERIMENTAL, although it surely isn't difficult, "apt-get -t experimental install evolution". That assumes you've put the appropriate entry in /etc/apt/sources.list. Packages are put into experimental, many times, before unstable for initial testing by a small group, definitely not intended for mass consumption.

.PST files are insanely fat...

[hirschma]

The equivalent mbox or maildir will be a small fraction of that size. .PST files, for some reason, are just huge for what they contain.

damn send/receive

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate the send/receive button. I like thunderbird's mail setup. When you hit send it sends right there and when hit Get Mail, mail is gotten.

Re:"toy" look

[uucp2]

It still has that look of a kids toy..

Exactly! I am starting a Xaw theme project for GTK now, will you join me?

Best Calendaring out there...

[freelock]

I just got Evo 2.0 set up on my laptop, with the new Mandrake 10.1. While I've been having trouble getting my Palm sync'd correctly, I have to say, the new calendar feature is great.

You can subscribe to the same web calendars used by Apple ICal and Mozilla Sunbird/Calendar. But you can also drag events to a personal calendar, where you can synchronize it with a PDA. You can select any set of calendars to publish for Free/Busy (it looks like it can merge multiple calendars, but haven't tested), and you can then attach the URL for your calendar to your VCard, send to other Evolution recipients AND Outlook users, and they can see when you're available to schedule a meeting.

I've been waiting for these features for months--it promises to be the best of all worlds for calendaring. Now to see if it delivers!

Re:Best Calendaring out there...

[elambi]

I havn't been able to sync my Palm yet either. I'm running a dual boot system but lately I'll just stay in windows running firefox, it's not from a lack of trying either.

Re:Best Calendaring out there...

[freelock]

Well, I have successfully synced. I'm just having to go through and manually de-dupe all the contacts, because they get pulled into Evolution without a "display name", and now you've got two of everything. Started with ~450 contacts... next thing you know I'm up to over 900!

Pilot-dedupe got rid of 50 of the duplicates, but the rest I'm having to go through one-by-one...

Word to the wise: sync BEFORE upgrading, and then just do a one way copy the first time you sync. I would've restored a backup, but had some new contacts manually entered in the Palm, and didn't want to lose all the other non-Palm fields from Evolution...

Re:Best Calendaring out there...

[RicoX9]

I decided to run a nice clean install of MDK 10.1. Backed up my home dir, blew it away. Clean install. Upon login, I copied my /`/evolution dir back. Crank up Evolution 2.0 and it politely refused to import my data. I re-set up my IMAP store (Exchange). Couldn't even add contacts. Contacts window stayed blank, not even the default Ximian contact. The backend processes for calendaring and such were all there and running.

Long story short, I did another clean install of 10.0 Official, put my data back, and it runs fine. I'll wait for 10.1 Official to try again.

Re:Best Calendaring out there...

[freelock]

Hmm. I didn't have any trouble here.

Clean install of MDK 10.1. I use IMAP, too, so no email to import. Started it up, checked it out, used it for a day or two. Then decided I liked it enough to move my contacts/calendar/tasks over from another workstation.

I did "evolution --force-shutdown" from the command line to kill all the backend processes. Then copied the addressbook, calendar, and task files from my old Evo 1.4 ~/evolution/local directories over the new ones in the ~/.evolution directories. They were in different directories, but easy enough to find.

Started it up, and everything was there! Perfect!

Until I synced my Palm...

Re:Best Calendaring out there...

[NotZed]

evolution stores configuration data in gconf since 1.4 i think. you need to back that up as well as the stuff in ~/evolution.

Re:Great news... but does it sync with PocketPC?

[datastalker]

Use MultiSync (http://multisync.sourceforge.net/)... I got it to work with my Verizon Treo 600 and Evolution 1.4, and if it can do that, it should have no problem syncing your Pocket PC.

Open-Xchange?

[Doc Ruby]

How about hooking up with the GPL version of Open-Xchange? Does that achieve parity with the MS Outlook/Exchange combo, while letting sysadmins replace MS Exchange with something GPL, without the Outlook users even noticing the switch? Is the Outlook/Evolution wall finally broken?

Re:Great news... but does it sync with PocketPC?

[beady]

I am having problems locating an EDS (evolution data server) plugin for multisync, which is a real shame.
If anyone feels like pointing me in the right direction though, feel free!

WHY did you destroy EVOLUTION ??

[The MESMERIC]

Why did you remove the NEWS FEED?
Why did you remove the World Weather?
Why do i get Back-End Busy messages now?
Why did you change the look?

Evolution-1.4 was one of the most impressive apps, I really like it and now its SHIT!

Developers destroyed Evolution, much like they destroyed Gnome with that most annoying SPATIAL crap.

If its brilliant DONT FIX IT!

Re:WHY did you destroy EVOLUTION ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh shut up. I'm getting real tired of the complaints about the 'spatial crap'. If you try it for a few days, you start getting used to it and it REALLY IS USEFUL! If you really find yourself thinking that you can't live with spatial, then it is EASY to turn browser mode back on.

As for the features that are no longer in Evolution, they are present in GNOME in the form of applets. The developers removed these features because there really isn't much of a reason to have duplicate features!

You clearly have no clue what you are talking about.

Re:WHY did you destroy EVOLUTION ??

[The MESMERIC]

For someone that installed Gnome via Garnome I believe I do have a clue what I am talking about ;)

14 days is sufficient testing.

Ex-Gnome fan here. Converted to KDE

Maybe you wanna tell those developers that left Gnome the same.

Re:WHY did you destroy EVOLUTION ??

[The MESMERIC]

ah yeah forgot the mention:
NOT even the ALARM works!

and as for "why duplicate features?"
ah right - so the developers have to think what is best for me??

man those applets are crap anyway.

I want newsfeed and weather back not some floating applets - at least a plugin then!

Re:WHY did you destroy EVOLUTION ??

[FyRE666]

While I agree about Gnome's shit spatial browser idea, there was plenty to be fixed in Evo 1.4. I stopped using it as the html rendering of emails was diabolical. Some people (me included) do actually need to receive html emails and have them look vaguely similar to the layout that was sent. This is why I'm currently using Thunderbird for email. I also have a lot of mailboxes, and folders set up, and Evo was taking a huge amount of resources, whereas Thunderbird, with the same amount of data takes barely half of the resources.

I will be trying Evo 2.0 as soon as the ebuild appears though...

Re:WHY did you destroy EVOLUTION ??

[smitty45]

while you're obviously feeling strong about those things....they are subjective. Alarm works fine for me, and I'm liking the fixes....1.4 had a lot to be fixed.

Re:WHY did you destroy EVOLUTION ??

[The MESMERIC]

Yeah I suppose they can't please anyone.

Those changes and those in Gnome did it for me.
I loved Gnome and Evolution-1.4
The weather app was cool because you could have 3 cities,
then a fix list of say some 10 news feed.
That was the Summary Page.
Maybe its my system I find Evo-1.5 more unstable than 1.4
(crashes every now and again - whereas before it was extremely rare)
The HTML of 1.4 I never checked it - hope they didnt come ugly - that would be pretty embarrasing.


Someone said Sylphweed-Claws is a good app -
going to check that out.

Re:WHY did you destroy EVOLUTION ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe its my system I find Evo-1.5 more unstable than 1.4

Gosh, that couldn't be because 1.5 is the unstable development release, could it? Of course it's not as stable as 1.4, or as the final 2.0 release.

Mod parent up

[codergeek42]

/agree

Re:"toy" look

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there is an evolution-connector module that provides access to Exchange. It works well.

This is exactly why....

[Anonymous Coward]

you know how that sentence ends.

Not bad overall

[apankrat]

But Icons ?! They are a waaay too small ... how can one expect an average user to hit 64x64 icon and not to miss ? Duh, just think about it.

KMail

[MikeCapone]

Have you tried KMail? Best email client I've tried, and it has been getting even better recently.

Give it a look.

Re:Great news... but does it sync with PocketPC?

[GMFTatsujin]

Wow -- if you can get a PocketPC to sync with anything at all, ever, then my hat's off to you. I hate having to support those damn things.

As far as MS Mobile... maybe you're running into the Y20K bug?

I'm giving up mod_points for this.....

[p.rican]

What's up with the subluiminal advertising by O'Reilly?.....Whenever I clickkkkked the 'next' button to view the sdcreenshots, I saw an image of "****** Hacks" books on the screen nad then I saw the actual screenshot............
Alright, that was my last beer.
Don't drink and /.
Don't din\k and /.

From a GroupWise user and trainer

[GMFTatsujin]

I'm excited that Novell has invested in Evolution, but after seeing their java-based client, I have to hold back my optimism. Most of the client was crippled and akward. I don't know if it was a java thing or what, but it was so bad that I just learned to live at work without keeping my email client up all day. I guess I can thank Novell for that, at least, since the day seems to go by much more quickly.

As far as Evolution goes, I'm curious to know what kind of integration is really in there. Can it handle proxying from account to account? How about sharing address books and folders? Do existing rules carry over? Is there a counterpart to Notify? In other words, is Evolution a complete replacement for GroupWise, or just a slapdash patchover?

All the screen shots are okay, but I'm worried about what I'm not seeing, even though they're trolling through all the menues ad nauseum.

RSS Summary gone

[baggins2002]

I noticed that the RSS Summary page is gone.
During the last week a couple of magazines have come out with articles showing all the good things you can do with RSS.
Now some of the MS techies around here are going RSS.. RSS.. RSS it's so great. it's so wonderful, We've got to have it, we should put it in every application and on everybodies desktop.

So last week I showed them that it was and had been incorporated into Evolution.

So now they take it out!!!!
Man talk about bad timing
Plus they discuss all the other places in gnome where you can use/find it. I've tried some of those and they never seemed to work as good.
How many users, have the news scroll working on there desktop? Yeah, that's real useful. Five letters in a title scrolling by in a window. If I write it down as they go by, I may be able to figure out the title.
Maybe I should go sell my Novell stock, because it's beginning to look like Netware all over again.

Re:RSS Summary gone

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution's news aggregator was so basic as to be almost useless. For me, it was just a waste of memory.

Use a program built for news reading, like RSS Owl.

Multitasking

[erice]

For me is easier to read the newsgrups at the same time that i read my email

You may not know this, but you can run multiple applications at this same time in pretty much all modern operating systems. Integrated applications, for the purpose of doing two tasks at the same time, went out with DOS.

Authentication is a pretty standard feature for news readers these days. Which ones were you having trouble with?

Still can't edit From: header?

[erice]

Why do so many programs screw this up? With Mutt, I can type in a new address in the From: line. That means I don't have to configure every single one of the 100+ mail addresses I use to keep the spammers away.

A simple, highly useful feature. Instead we get auto-generated smiley's.

Re:Still can't edit From: header?

[Ph33r th3 g(O)at]

Then people would be here accusing them of making it too easy for mere users to spoof their From: address.

The workaround I use for this in OS X Mail.app is to keep a dummy account and change the address every time I want to send an email from a tagged account. I agree that having to do this sucks, though.

Not funny, true

[nwbvt]

Agreed. This just looks downright ugly. I use Kontact which is no eye candy itself (I'm hoping to move to thunderbird once it gets a little further developed), but at least it doesn't look as bad as this.

And yes developers, appearance matters.

Re:Not funny, true

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the way you used your karma bonus on what is essentially a "me too" post. Top notch form, my friend.

Actually, I take that back. All it demonstrates is your egomania.

On another note, what's up with your equating Sonia Gandhi's voluntary resignation with the mass disenfranchisement of Indian voters? The argument makes no sense, and reeks of desperation--the desperation of an intellectually oblivious turd attempting to squeeze its way out of a constipated colon of its own construction. This much is clear to everybody except, evidently, yourself.
--
Sick of pompous windbags? Change "Karma Bonus" modifier to -1 penalty.

jeez...

[aggieben]

When are we finally going to see these office-suite types of software packages offer built-in support for PGP/GPG? For crying out loud...half the problems we have with email could be solved if people used PGP and a whole heck of a lot more people would use PGP if it were built-in to their email client; that goes especially for the web email services like hotmail.

Who cares who copies whom

[bitswapper]

So what if it looks too much like Lookout? MS/Gates lives in a cold sweat of people doing to them what they have done to others.

I say - let it happen. Let MS's worst reflective fears come to light, and let the chips fall where they may.

If they successfully get the US government, and possibly others to supress the open source movement or artifically prop them up in some way, then let it happen. Let the 'Mandate of heaven' rule in that case.

After all, if the US government installs patents/legislation/etc to protect MS, then innovation moves to other countries. The USA can sit there like a kid alone in a sand box full of 'gummies', while countries who don't give damn about MS's quasi-panicked fears go ahead and join in the benefits of the natural evolution of things in the software realm. Let copies/ripoffs be what they are, and may the best coders win.

Kind of a 'Lord of flies' software island earth, if you substitute 'bugs' for 'flies'. C'mon - at least try and think about it.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Evolution

[MicroBerto]

Evolution is one of my favorite (if not THE favorite) GPL applications, but I'll wait until they fix their alarms if that's for real. I use them all the time.

On an offtopic note, I was reading The Salmon of Doubt (Stuff from Douglas Adams that you've probably never seen), which i lost and better find before the library charges me a hundred dollars, and he recommended reading The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. It's about evolution, and so far, it's incredible. I'm only a few chapters deep, but his reasoning, philosophy, and insight is great. Check it out if you are interested (or even an expert) on evolution. Disclaimer being that i'm not far into it so watch out.

Multisync

[Xhargh]

Does anyone know if multisync http://multisync.sourceforge.net/ still works with Evolution 2.0? I am using Evolution 1.4.6 and Multisync 0.82 and I will not upgrade Evolution until I know that it will continue to work.

distro

[Anonymous Coward]

So use a distro.

Look before you leap

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution did GPG ages ago. So does KMail, and a number of others.

Re:Look before you leap

[aggieben]

I *did* look before I leap, to an extent. I read as much about the new version of Evolution before posting as I had time for, and I never saw any mention of PGP in the features list or anywhere else. A more thorough inspection of the site may turn up a mention, but that still validates my point. People don't use it because they don't know about it; if it's an obscure feature hidden in the tarpit of feature-pork, what good is it? The people that know it's there already use it and would use it anyway, and the people who don't know it's there aren't any better off.

IMAP storing calendar info

[sita]

I wonder how hard it would be to take an existing IMAP server and store things like the evolution calender and task list on it.

In the outlook/exchange paradigm outlook does most of the work. Why not do the same thing with evolution?

Well, just fire up a DAV server next to the IMAP server and there you go.

Evolution 2.0 has been released...

[the_germ]

...2 weeks ago! Congratulations!

Didn't anyone notice this was released as part of GNOME 2.8?

Wow, wait! GNOME 2.8 is out? Jeez...! ;-)

Flamebait?

[Anonymous Coward]

The "flamebait" moderation is unfair .If some clown is going to complain about spaces before punctuation ,then it 's fair game to complain about his /her own mistakes .

major bug

[Anonymous Coward]

They released it with a major bug like this one?

#234863 - evolution: The mail component eats memory till swap is gone then crashes

Nice theory, but not realistic

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the phrase you're looking for is patent violation. To be a copyright violation there needs to be evidence of copying source code. Unless I missed it, there's no-one on the mono crew that works for MS. And since there is no such thing as Intellectual Property... Then again maybe you were referring to trade secrets, which could be considered intellectual property. It's tricky to release software and still consider how it works as a trade secret.

Black - White Nah Grey - Gray

Re:Nice theory, but not realistic

[BrokenHalo]

I think the phrase you're looking for is patent violation.

OK, you're right, that is what I meant.

You're nitpicking, though. The point I'm making is that Ximian (and others) in their embracing of .NET (in the guise of Mono) are lining themselves up for a nasty surprise when the MS lawyers get stuck in with an unlimited budget behind them. If enough apps developers embrace Mono, the case has the potential to do much more damage than the SCO fiasco.

give me a break

[Anonymous Coward]

"alarms don't work properly if Evolution runs past midnight"?

Isn't this a major, core, indispensable, required, manadatory, not to be left out, compulsory, for god's sake don't screw it up, feature of a mail/groupware/calendar application?

Why is this release not being delayed until the alarms work? That's just embarrassing.

I wish

[mrmeval]

That mozilla could be integrated into the evolution environment. I dislike evolution for mail but it's other features are good.

No support for external editor

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do I waste my time hoping that UNIX-hating developers will accomodate people who actually like the UNIX way?

Re:yeah...yeah... all hail to our ximian overloard

[Anonymous Coward]

Process Name Memory RSS Memory
evolution-2.0 73.7 19.6
evolution-data-server-1.0 71.4 7.3
evolution-alarm-notify 61.4 8.5

Don't forget to take into account shared memory. Mine still don't add up to 300MB but if you look, a good portion of that is shared memory, which means you can't just add up all the processes total memory usage.

Plus mine is custom built (Gentoo), which may result in less memory usage...

Obligatory Link

[Seek_1]

http://www.zombiereagan.com/

To all who replied....

[simetra]

To those of you with genuine suggestions, thanks, I'll give them a shot.

For the rest of you saw fit to insult me, call me an "end user", and etc., this is exactly the snobbish attitude that prevents anyone in the real world (i.e., holding real actual paying jobs in IT) from seriously considering Linux solutions. You really do open-source a discredit.

My point was that OpenOffice.org, for example, is a complete, nice installer. I didn't have to wait for my "distro" to prebundle it for me. I only wish other software came the same way. I do have an interest in using Evolution as an alternative to outlook, but having to download, build, install, etc., 6 bleeding packages is a turn-off.

Re:To all who replied....

[ajs]

For the rest of you saw fit to insult me, call me an "end user"

If you consider being called an end-user an insult, I'm sorry. It happens to be the most accurate term for someone who has a problem with downloading several packages in support of a major desktop app. You SHOULD NOT have to do that, and that's why you wait for a distro to do the integration work. If you're inclined to do that sort of thing, you're not an end-user.

I'm an evolution end-user. I *could* download pure source and go from there, as I'm quite capable of doing so, but I just don't have the time. Thus, I'm an end-user.

this is exactly the snobbish attitude that prevents anyone in the real world (i.e., holding real actual paying jobs in IT) from seriously considering Linux solutions.

I'm in the real world. I deploy and maintain hundreds of Linux systems for large companies. I was not being snobbish, but folks who are over-sensitve to being catagorized as end-users won't get very far no matter how folks like me try to help.

You really do open-source a discredit.

So be it. I'd rather discredit open source by offering constructive advice than insult those who give it to me.

Forward rule

[X00M]

I wonder if they finally added a forwarding rule?

Changed my distro JUST to get Evolution-1.4 back

[The MESMERIC]

Now I have my NEWS FEED
Now I have the WORLD WEATHER
Now I don't get Back-END Busy BUG messages
Now I have an ALARM bell that works

And I got nothing against an OUTLOOK-clonish look.

Don't underestimate the preferences of a customer.

One Damn Obvious Rule!