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Linux Desktop Email Key to Success
littlepill writes "It looks as though email clients are vital for Linux to succeed in the desktop battle. ZDNet says, "the lack of a powerful email application could hinder the adoption of Linux on the desktop". So, even though Novell's Evolution is one viable and valid product, it seems that there is a clear "message to application vendors to focus on developing a quality email application for the Linux desktop"." I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users.
Mozilla developers are already addressing this issue. The Mozilla Foundation recently published an initial roadmap for 'Lightning', the project to integrate its calendar application Sunbird with its email application Thunderbird.
Soooo, it's not so much that there's any hindering going on. And like the Magic 8 Ball, Ask Again Later.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Do they really mean just e-mail, or do they mean a replacement for Outlook? There are many decent e-mail clients on many platforms, but IME it's the lack of things like calendars and Exchange connectivity that get in the way at the office, and cause things like Thunderbird to be rejected even though there's a Windows version.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Windows doesn't have a decent email client either but they seem to be doing okay on the desktop.
I've itched about this before as well - Thunderbird very well could blow away Outlook in many organizations, but the CALENDAR *SUCKS* - Sorry, Sunbird sucks more ass than anything that has even sucked ass before. The last time I tried it, it was incapable of recognizing its own calendar files, instead they were opening as plain old text in Mozilla.
Here's my idea: Ditch flippin Chatzilla. Put a lot of effort towards the calendar.
The Calendar is one of the big reasons (that I have found) that people stick with Microsoft Outlook.
It doesn't even have to be the whiz-bang calendar like Outlook has, but it'd be nice if it would actually work worth a crap.
Check out my website: Playfully Clever
Eh hem, at the risk of being marked as flamebait, I would like to say that it should have been "Intelligent people are Linux Desktop's key to success". For someone to say that Linux has a lack of powerful email clients is just absurd. People just don't know where to look or realize that sometimes, programs like mutt, fetchmail and all the other "do one thing well" programs are a better solution than having a large bloaty email app. If you don't believe me, look at the state of Internet email as caused by large GUI email applications. I'm all for more intuitive interfaces and GUI apps that make
People, computers are not cars, they are not toasters, they are not televisions.... they are anything that you want them to be, and this is fundamental reason they are hard to use, change so often and are prone to crashing.
was mozilla thunderbird completely overlooked in this FUD-filled article?
I second the webmail thing. Before I quit my last windows-dominated job (to try my hand at this full-time), it was common for me to use the IE-based Outlook Web Access client since Outlook itself was often buggier.
In fact, there's not much I need a Windows machine for.
Mutt works far better than any email program I have used on Windows -- including Outlook, Eudora, and Thunderbird.
FireFox is all I need for web browsing.
GAIM is all I need for IMing.
But, I haven't found a replacement for Agent for USENET access. Everything I've used on other platforms is inferior.
It doesn't let you work on email off-line. Also, bringing your messages to your local machine makes them somewhat easier to protect. Are you worried about someone reading your email? Disconnect from the 'net.
(No, it isn't the perfect solution. But I trust my system more than I trust my ISP.)
I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users.
Why? Webmail is slow at times and your Internet connection could be unavailable or only available at intervals. GMail, while great and all, isn't something I'm comfortable with even though I have 100s of labels and filters to make it readable. It's extremely slow on older CPUs and just b/c Google thinks that you don't need the "Folder concept" doesn't mean I don't want that.
With Webmail I can't get my e-mail to my machine and HOLD IT. I like the feeling that my e-mail is stored on *my* machine. I choose to archive my e-mail at GMail but it's not something I *must* have. In fact, depending on their future choices, I may remove all that e-mail and go back to just having it archived on WORM media.
I'm unconvinced- I think webmail will soon be replacing client side readers for all but power users.
Bobbins. Even users who would join the luddites given half a chance, in my experience, prefer to use a proper mail client as soon as email becomes a part of everyday life.
I'm a fan of Thunderbird (in its new 1.5beta form) - though even with that I'm frustrated by the lack of support for updatable LDAP (or other shared) address books. That and 'grammar checking' are the two things I wish FOSS could catch up with. Outlook & exchange have had these essentials covered for years. FOSS needs a lightweight feature-complete email client - I'm still waiting.
1. Evolution deletes mail by putting it into a virtual folder and hiding the original message in your inbox. This is ok and seamless to the end user UNLESS you happen to also use webmail. In which case your inbox will be cluttered by messages you thought you'd gotten rid of ages ago. The evolution team has flat out refused to address this issue and has been calling this 'not a bug' (which is true) since 2001.
2. Same as above but for Junk Mail.
3. Finding unread messages in Evolution is difficult. Sorting in general is more flexible in Thunderbird IMHO.
4. Thunderbird is cross-platform. From a corporate standpoint this has let me train the entire staff on Thunderbird before installing linux on any workstation. Once linux is installed, they will be using all their familiar apps but without the viruses, spyware, and blue screens of death.
5. Thunderbird will eventually get calendaring as part of Mozilla Lightning. While that's probably years away, I am patient and hopefuly that this will allow us to eventually get back full exchange-type functionality. Regardless, the calendar is not critical for our office.
Evolution does have some great features, notably beagle integration which I would love love love to see in Thunderbird. Unfortunately I don't have the needed talent to make that happen..
I always try really hard to use evolution because of beagle integration and I always end up going back to Thunderbird which I feel is a good enough client to satisfy the typical corporate desktop. At least for small businesses who don't need the calendar.
Why is there a preoccupation with webmail? It's an annoying buzzwordy type solution - oh look, we've got WEBMAIL - and is crap compared to a proper desktop client. And yes, i've got gmail. Why would I want to spend time jumping to the next screen of 20 messages (outlook webmail anyone) when i can scroll properly through thousands in a desktop client? I can't think of a *single* advantage of webmail except for the ability to access email from any pc on the web - which in my book relegates it to a backup solution and not the preferred method of access.
I got a chance to use Ximian Evolution once in a Linux computer lab several years ago at University, and I was impressed by how much better it was than Outlook Express, and felt a lot like Outlook. I'm not sure how good it is at the advanced calendar sharing that some offices seem to demand these days, but it strikes me as a worthy successor to Outlook.
Although I have a feeling it would never be too popular in Kansas.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Much as I'd like to use Evolution, it's got a few show-stopping problems:
* Leaving POP3 mail on the server is all-or-nothing. I'd like to see the "delete after X days", "delete after it's gone from the inbox" options that have existed in other POP3 clients for the past ten years or so.
* Displaying large messages is slooooow. As a sysadmin, I regularly deal with 1-5MB log files in my email. If I have to wait 30 seconds each for them to display, I'm not gonna use that program.
* No advanced search. You can't search more than a single mailbox at a time.
On the upside, the GPG integration is better than any other mail client I've used. Still, until they can deal with these fairly basic problems/lack of features, it's a no-go.
Causation can cause correlation
What's wrong with Connector? Evo seems to work as well with Exchange servers as Outlook. I use meetings/calendar all the time.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
they're calling for an exact clone of Outlook. they're not looking for power or the next big thing, like Taco. they just want it to work like windows for gods sakes so that businesses can use it without fear their employees will burn down the office.
The key problem to mass adoption of a linux desktop is the lack of proprietary apps on linux.
For example: I work in the dental industry. We use digital xrays and a computerized practice manager. There are few valid options for a practice manager running on linux, and NO digital xray apps.
Hence, we use windows.
I think if you go looking, you will see it's much to same for other industries.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
...and that can be fixed with a backend change to decent groupware servers running open protocols. Oh, is that it? Well then, I'll just email the admin of my university and insist that he/she immediately take down that exhange server and replace it. Same goes for the admin at my enormous company, whom I'm sure will be more than happy to make a simple backend change to a decent groupware server from MS exchange, nevermind all the management being dependent on MS products.
the email clients should conform to the backend that is being used in reality, not the other way around.
Listen up gang, the morons at ZDNet will always be publishing a "Linux will fail because....." article. Trolling is all they are good for anymore. Evolution even comes with a FREE connector to talk to Microsoft Exchange and they still post trolls trying to divert development effort into unproductive pursuits.
No, if you care about Linux on the desktop we need exactly two things.
1. An open replacement for Microsoft Exchange, so Evolution's connector isn't forever chasing Exchange's taillights and so more shops can get the Exchange monkey off their back. In the same vein as OpenDocument, establish an open standard for the scheduling and calendaring features of Ecchange PHBs love so and ram them hard enough Exchange and Outlook must fully implement them.
2. Pushing a wee bit harder for OpenDocument. Break MS Office's stranglehold on the world's data files and what OS is under your Office productivity app isn't nearly as important.
This isn't hard, Microsoft understood it perfectly when they stated the key to victory was to decommoditize the protocols. So long as they succeed in that they keep winning. And just as obviously if we can commoditize everything important in IT, mail, calendaring, directory services, file sharing, etc, we win.
Democrat delenda est
In most cases, I've had a pretty difficult time explaining the POP paradigm to less tech-savvy folks anyway. Before I manage to fix things, they don't understand why their friends are getting bounced emails about "full accounts" when their local inbox in OE is empty. Gmail and other webmail services remove that confusion and additionally provide the feature that the email-checking experience is roughly identical on any machine they use to check their mail. Non-power users simply don't consider it worth the effort to use a local mail reader.
Have you ever used Outlook Web Access? It's one of the original applications using what people have recently labelled AJAX (Microsoft created the XMLHttpRequest object back in IE 5 and use it in their Outlook Web Client). So, they were a step ahead of everyone else in regards to an AJAX Web Mail interface, they just limited it to Outlook Web Access instead of putting it in MSN Mail or Hotmail.
"Only" power users? Power users were the drivers for the bloat of office applications over the last 15 years. If the power users in which ever office environment aren't satisfied with the amount of crap in an application, the word will get around that it's "crippled". Face it, if a mail client doesn't match or exceed Outlook's feature set (minus the security hassles), the closest it'll get to the mass of business desktops is as a bullet point on C/Net.
Luke, help me take this mask off
I would dearly love to see something like SquirrelMail expanded to include fully functional centralized calendars and contact management. I could probably drop Exchange/Outlook and all the woes that come along with them, but calendaring and contact management are the chief requirements.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
It's too sappy.
Coffee is my drug of choice.
It appears Scalix offers all of this. Anybody have any experience with it?
Why is it that no one ever defines their criteria in those articles? Once you do that, it becomes easy to evaluate the current apps. Here's my list.
#1. Shared email folders. I should be able to share a folder with anyone else in the company. (Totally amazing would be the ability to do so, securely, with anyone on the Internet).
#2. Shared calendars. Same as #1.
#3. Send appointments/meeting requests to people via #2.
#4. Delegation. I should be able to assign various rights to my email to other people so they can check the business crap when I'm on vacation.
#5. Alias/Roles. I should be able to send items as "webmaster" and "postmaster" and myself.
Okay, those are my 5. Anyone got anything I missed or any reason why one of those should not be there?
About 50% of companies use Exchange/Outlook (or OWA) for their e-mail. In order for Linux desktops to become more widespread they need to be able to seamlessly integrate with Exchange. Period.
Ironically, the next version of OWA will be so good that the Outlook rich-client will become more or less optional. As long as your Linux machine has a browser capable of displaying OWA, you've solved your e-mail problems.
The current version of OWA already has decent support for non-IE browsers, and they're apparently going to improve that a great deal in the next release.
See: Exchange 12 Channel 9 Video
Must we continue to follow Microsloths mistake of integrating calendaring with e-mail.
-- sas
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
Most of the companies I have contact with use Outlook because of its meetings and appointments.
If a linux program can integrate with email to schedule tasks and meetings and have that information on a central server that everyone can view then that is all they really need.
Well... They also need server side rules and out of office replies.
Oh thirdly, they need the ability to recall messages and see if messages have been read by recipient. Its a corporate thing, trust me.
Oh and delegation! All these corp suits have this administrative assistants who need to be able to modify their calenders, read, their emails, send on their behalf, and then schedule meetings and set reminders.
Outlook can do all of the above, so can Groupwise, and so can Lotus Notes (well except the recall message and read receipt feature).
If a Linux program (or OS X program for that matter) can do all of the above then companies will be able to switch without too much problem. Pop mail and simple Imap won't cut it.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Q: Where are the "decent groupware servers running open protocols"?
A: They don't exist. I work at an IT shop that supports over 40,000 users and we went out of our way to find a solution that would scale out and provide the capability to serve email & calendaring. The Outlook/Exchange combo was by far the best solution.
There are plenty of good email servers out there. But there aren't alot of good, robust calendar servers out there that are price competitive with Exchange. And if you need shared mailboxes, delegates, etc... the solutions are either too complicated or don't work well at all.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Hey, two questions:
1. How much does MS pay you to astroturf?
2. Where can I get some of that action?
SBS for home!
I like reading the forum posts to keep track of the prevailing popular opinions and sometimes to add my own point of view. In this case, after clicking Read More, the first thing I did was search for pine.
Attachments: check.
Address book: check.
Managed folders: check.
Menu-driven interface: check.
Configurability: check.
Full headers: check.
No bloat: check.
Secure: check.
While pine has the option to launch external apps for custom content I don't subscribe to that group. If a file is sent to me I'd much rather save it to the HD so that I can dissect it from there.
Want to send me an HTML e-mail? DON'T. It's stupid. Send a link to a page if you must or, preferably, use a LART and rewrite the e-mail in plain text.
Imagine a world where the most prominent communication platform is speech or plain text. Oh the horror. One wonders how man managed to not die out prior to 1995.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
Isn't E-mail only for old people? At least in Korea......
First, let me preface this by saying that when I was in the consulting gig (for 5+ years, just got out 3 mo's ago), I set up a number of Windows 2k3 SBS servers, and they do have advantages.
BUT
Outlook Web Access is just plain crap. Its slow, requires oodles of bandwidth, and is only about 20% that Outlook 2003 really is. Dont believe me? Try to open 3 shared calendars in OWA. It doesnt work. SBS makes up for it in other areas.
I think there is something to Webmail replacing Desktop email, but not for a long, long time. How many people read IMAP email in Offline mode while travelling? I know I do. I'm not giving up my thunderbird anytime soon, until I can use Webmail in offline mode (which doesnt seem really feasible). Granted, I am a power use, so Taco wasnt speaking to me.
Brushfire
Tor Lillqvist is porting gtk/etc code to windows, been doing it for most of the year from what I know. You can read his blog here
http://tml-blog.blogspot.com/
He speaks of running evolution on windows in the 3rd or 4th blog entry.
Outlook is the best designed e-mail client out there.
:-)
Every view is cusomizable. The arrangement and display of mail can be changed to support whatever you would like.
Columns are automatically changed based on the available screen space - something not seen implemented in any other e-mail client.
The calendaring function is unsurpassed. Especially in a domain deployment.
You can also compose an e-mail and send it without using the mouse. In a GUI this is special, command line not so much
Scripting is incredibly useful if you have applications to deploy where you don't want users launching 6 applications to get their day to day work done, sales benefit greatly from outlook integration.
Integration with office allows for a very high level of interaction and collaboration between outlook users.
Outlook also has real time message notification.
The list goes on. There are a number of reasons why users love outlook.
It's got little to do with actual functionality and everything to do with the perception that you need an Outlook replacement for email.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
They don't really mean email. They mean a lot of extra stuff, including things I would never guess is email-related, such as calendars. Well, a todo list isn't "email!" They should have said what they really mean: that the platform is weak on "groupware" or something like that. That may be debatable too, but at least then they would be saying something that isn't completely stupid, misleading, and insulting/flamebait.
As for webmail, webmail is something I'll never take seriously, because you can't have privacy with webmail. Cryptography must be performed at a trusted endpoint, not a remote server. Webmail is a technological step backwards for email, simply one of those bad ideas left-over from the dot-com era, whose flashiness and "coolness" has allowed it to survive in spite of its fundamental flaws.
It's only a matter of time until some well-written news story breaks where some government gets caught red-handed drift-net-fishing through lots of innocent people's email (maybe combined with the realization that someone's robot is reading your email to decide what to advertise to you). When that happens, more people will wake up to the fact that having email be unencrypted is just plain dumb. How many times that can happen before critical mass is achieved, I have no idea -- but the day is coming, and it will be death to webmail.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Take the example of a meeting I just got out of. A multi-departmental shareholders meeting with over 12,000 people in 70+ countries all in different time zones. It took 72 hours to set it up so everyone could be available. It all coordinated automagically via Exchange calendering. This is not an uncommon occurance although 100 people is more the norm for project or department meetings. Until you have actually worked for a large (think 10,000 or more employees) organization that has a high need for communication (which would be about any company), you wont get how essential this type of communication is. Also, remember it's not just people you are scheduling, but satellite or circuit time, rooms, video teleconferencing equipment, laptops, etc.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Try it.
Regards;
Holy shit you're right.
Check out his post history, they're all "look at this great thing that microsoft makes"
Astroturfing is worse than ads above the pisser
Take a breath and read this before you Notes haters start slagging. If you really want a chance at removing Exchange for Linux you need to look at Domino. And don't bitch if you haven't seen version 6.5 or later.
The reasons businesses deploy integrated e-mail is that they don't want to deploy multiple products or immature products or both. Domino is regarded by admins as far superior -- it's much more secure, scalable, reliable, runs on all sorts of different hardware and OSs. It just does. Companies run it on Linux (RH, SUSE, and zSeries Linux) with the same never-touch-it reliability as your Apache Web box. It's got all the policies and admin capabilities that you need to manage distributed organizations. I know a lot of people don't love the Notes client but it does a hell of a lot more than Outlook -- you can't live in Outlook if you've figured out Notes. BTW Domino also supports Outlook and a very nice cross-platform DHTML Webmail, supportied on IE/Firefox and Win/Linux/Mac.
Sorry, if you are going to propose POP/IMAP and LDAP and iCAL as an Exchange (or Domino) alternative you will lose. Period. Each of those vendors has sold over 100 million seats. Even if you win 100 conversions, that's still over hundreds of thousands of customers for each of the two leaders.
The real problem you face is that it's tough to get ANY enterprise messaging system replaced once it's deployed. The problem with Exchange is that all the users THINK they love Outlook because that's what they know, or worse, confuse it with that free Windows abomination known as Outlook Express.
The only way to get Outlook and Exchange out is to create a client that is identical to Outlook (which is what Evolution and others attempt to do, with mixed succes), but more importantly works as well against Exchange as Outlook. Problem there is MS will immediately change MAPI so that it breaks.
Look I'm with you guys but you're being impractical. Enterprise e-mail is unbelievably sticky. It can't break and it's got to have all the features people are used to. Exchange 2003 sucks a lot less than older versions -- if you use all of MS' other software and big horkin' machines, you might just get more than 250 users on a box (as opposed to Domino 7 on Linux which will easily get 1000+).
I'm looking over the wall, and they're looking at me!
I thought one of the major complaints about desktop Linux was its inability to back a single pony, so to speak. That there were so many alternatives and competing products that the whole landscape suffered. That used to be the line, at least.
Now, apparently, it's the fact that there aren't enough choices. Well, guess what? That's wrong too. You've got the big names, the Outlook killers: Evolution, Thunderbird, KMail; and the smaller, more specialized ones: Sylpheed Claws or one of the eleventy billion other clients on Freshmeat; and if you need Real Ultimate Email Power more than anything, there's still nothing around that even comes close to the flexibility of Procmail+Mutt+Vim or Gnus.
Truth is, though, that none of this matters. Huge companies are willing to give email away for free, make it highly available, and give you more storage capacity than you'd get if you were willing to pay (my Exchange account at work is limited to ~100MB, Gmail gives me >2GB). You get collaborative spam filtering, virus scanning, keyboard shortcuts for nerds like me who want to blow through mail, some of the best search algorithms in the world with near-instant speed, universal access from anywhere, and now hot new drag and drop UIs.
In fact, probably the first thing AJAX will kill (and I'm not even *that* big on AJAX) is traditional email. Email has long been a pain in the ass, and offloading it to companies who can deal with its site-by-site issues in bulk (blacklisting, storage, availability) is a huge win for people without the resources of a Fortune 500 company. The day Gmail lets you point your own domain's MX record at their servers and deliver mail for your own domain to your Gmail account (making this a cheap, but for-pay feature would be a fabulous way to make money on the service) is the day I take my SMTP server down for good.
Email client? Hah. I'm looking for ways to get email software and traditional email infrastructure as far away from my computers as possible.
Game... blouses.
Have you seen the new Oracle Collaboration Suite 10g Web Access Client? It's better than a poke in the eye: http://www.geocities.com/dont-like-junk@sbcglobal. net/oracle_web_access_client.jpg
Real email addresses have been blurred to protect the innocent.