Thunderbird Unseats Evolution In Ubuntu 11.10

An anonymous reader writes "Coinciding with the recent release of Mozilla Thunderbird 5 and its 400 performance and stability fixes, Canonical has decided that it's now fit for adoption in Ubuntu — and as of version 11.10, Thunderbird will replace Evolution as the default mail program. You can download the second alpha of Ubuntu 11.10 today and give Thunderbird a whirl."

Comments

BFT

[cadeon]

I've always hated evolution. Thunderbird is much cleaner.

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

So the creationists were wrong.

It isn't Intelligent Design that will supplant Evolution. Unintelligent Design will.

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always hated evolution. Thunderbird is much cleaner.

Look, can you religious nut-jobs take your "intelligent design" and thunder throwing sky gods elsewhere? Evolution is a well founded scientific...

What? Email programs?
*Ahem* Sorry for the interruption, carry on.

Re:BFT

[poetmatt]

absolutely. I also agree with the commenter below, get rid of empathy and go back to pidgin, and then we'll be a step closer to ubuntu not being crap.

Re:BFT

[operator_error]

Yes I agree. And while we're ditching Empathy, can we get Ekiga back for SIP calls that 'just work', or otherwise Jitsi?

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. I couldn't stand all the evolution plugins in the system framework that made it impossible to remove either. Thunderbird is a great all in one package to install.

Re:BFT

[ZankerH]

>implying the ubuntu team won't lock thunderbird in with a gazillion "system integration hacks" just like they did with evolution

Re:BFT

[LordLimecat]

Its a lot easier to have evolution once youve tried to apt-get uninstall evolution*, and then wonder why it nuked your whole Gnome environment. For added giggles, figure out why so much depends on evolution-data-server even when evolution is gone.

And then try to figure out in what way Evolution is superior to Outlook Web Access off of exchange 2010. (protip, its not).

Re:BFT

[LordLimecat]

Well, theres always Ubuntu derivatives that keep the good parts and hack out the bad.

Re:BFT

[xtracto]

Sure, but the problem with this announcement (that Ubuntu will drop Evolution) shows everything that is wrong with Ubuntu. Since the times of Ubuntu 5.10 the team makes every effort possible to change the base programs on each release. Being it the network configuration application, the chat application, the multimedia player, etc, etc etc.

I think it was around 8.04 that my dad asked me to reinstall Windows because he was tired of having to learn a new way to do things on each new version.

Re:BFT

[gaelfx]

Agreed. I can't believe it took so long for this change to happen on Ubuntu, considering that it's supposed to be focused on usability and Evolution clearly doesn't fit that bill. I've been using Thunderbird for a couple years now, and I have to say that it has really improved a lot (especially in getting server info, thank goodness) and deserves a seat at the table.

Re:BFT

[Tarlus]

This! Why are GNOME's core dependencies so entangled with Evolution components, anyway?

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok I am receiving contradictory information and I am definitely confused...

Coinciding with the recent release of Mozilla Thunderbird 5 and its 400 performance and stability fixes, Canonical has decided that it's now fit for adoption in Ubuntu

That suggests they have some stringent standards, especially considering the number of people who have been using Thunderbird for years without issue.

They have such stringent standards... and yet ... they really think that going with PulseAudio instead of ALSA by default is the smoothest, most problem-free experience they could deliver to their users? PulseAudio works okay I suppose, right up until you want to do anything even slightly unusual such as run a program as a different local user without crippling its audio for no good reason. Then it fails. Then they tell you running it as a system-wide daemon is not recommended. Then it's a big pain in the ass for no good reason where ALSA would have just worked. Then it's "no, we know how you should and should not be using your programs and listening to your audio, and I'm sorry but you have deviated away from how we want you to do things". No, I'm not accepting that. If I wanted that, I'd use Windows or OSX.

Maybe you guys like artificial restrictions, maybe you like moving from a system that worked to a more complex system that sometimes works, but I just don't see the damned point. Are you afraid to hurt the PulseAudio developer's feelings or something?

NOTICE TO ALL DISTRO DEVELOPERS: Alsa has had DMIX for close to ten years now. It has been enabled by default with ALSA for at least seven years now. With DMIX there is no longer ANY GOOD REASON to use these idiotic software sound daemons. They are redundant layers of trash. They are adipose code that can only introduce bugs and bloat. They add restrictions where there were none before, as side-effects of their design. They are a step backwards. They are a devolution.

The 0.001% of users who really need to play sound remotely over a network, and absolutely cannot accomplish that task by downloading/streaming an mp3 or other audio file, is NO GOOD REASON to make a useless sound daemon the default setup for everyone. This kind of decision-making just blows my mind.

Compared to that unnecessary bloat, why are they so strict about Thunderbird? Makes no sense. Have they an axe to grind or something?

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

I like thunderbird better too... But to be honest, I like the ease of just going to Gmail.com a lot more than either since then I have the same UI no matter from where I access it (Laptop, Home computer, work computer, phone, library, etc...) and it's right there in my homepage.

Re:BFT

[cadeon]

Because, Evolution has been a part of the default GNOME suite for a very long time, so as more functionality was built, developers could assume Evolution was there.

Oops.

Re:BFT

[frisket]

And while we're about that, can we pleeeeeeease ditch Okular and go back to kpdf and kdvi? Not only is Okular's rendering sucky, but it has no "Print Current Page" option, and the double sidebar takes up waaaaay too much screen real estate.

Re:BFT

[frisket]

Web-based email sucks little black toads. And it has no "Redirect" function. At least with Thunderbird there is a plugin.

Re:BFT

[Just Some Guy]

I'm willing to bet that they aren't removing Evolution from Ubuntu but just aren't installing it by default. If you're upgrading an older system, you'll get a newer version of Evolution along with everything else.

Re:BFT

[frisket]

Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'

Debian takes 42 years to configure. I need a distro that works out of the box.

Re:BFT

[causality]

Because, Evolution has been a part of the default GNOME suite for a very long time, so as more functionality was built, developers could assume Evolution was there.

Oops.

KDE is currently going down that path with Nepomuk and the whole semantic-desktop. Those things used to be optional. Then, increasingly, more and more programs wouldn't build without it (i.e. the entire kde-pim suite). This is functionality I don't want, will never use, and now can't get rid of without starting my own fork. Desktop search? To me the concept of "remember where you put stuff" was never that difficult. So I just disable it and call it a day. Though, before this, it was much easier to customize.

Does anyone remember KDE 3.x and ARTS and what a giant pain in the ass that was? Some programs depended on it and would not compile without it. Yet they couldn't have needed it that badly since they ran perfectly with ALSA when the ARTS daemon was clearly not running. Yet, at build time, they better find it to link against it or you get no compilation.

In all cases I wish these things were more modular and less interdependent. There's no reason an entire desktop environment should depend on a groupware suite. Just like there's no reason large parts of an entire desktop environment should depend on a desktop search utility. If they implement functionality that is truly indispensable and critical to a smoothly-functioning system, great, then put those few functions into the core kdelibs and libgnome and be done with it. If they aren't that important and don't warrant that kind of treatment, make them optional. Isn't a simplified dependency graph a good thing?

Bless our open source developers, but I think even they too are not immune to letting their "vision" of how a computer should be used interfere with the practical implementation of what is truly useful.

Re:BFT

[BitZtream]

Yea, I fucking hate it when someone bothers to take the time to make my applications start working together rather than all of them fumbling around like the only application in existence and trying to do EVERYTHING you could possibly want themselves.

The unix philosophy of chaining smaller apps together to get a lot more flexibility while still working in confined amounts of memory while still allowing work on large things is a great way to go.

However, realize it or not, the reason all those nice chained command lines work so well together is because people have thought about how they integrate with each other. If you think cut, grep, find, cat, touch, and most of the rest of /usr/bin aren't integrated with each other, you're just blind. Some of them, like xargs even exist almost soley as an integrator.

Don't be afraid of integration, just avoid shitty integration. Windows is an example of app integration that sucks. OS X is an example of it done reasonably well (At least for native apps on both accounts).

Re:BFT

[causality]

Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'

Debian takes 42 years to configure. I need a distro that works out of the box.

I have to admit, I was quite impressed when I recommended Kubuntu and in one case Xubuntu (for an older system) to a completely non-technical friend of mine. I was prepared to have to spend time helping with installation, configuration, etc. Instead, this person came to me a little later and told me the system is all set up, works great, and hasn't caused any problems. That was very nearly an expensive retail purchase of Windows 7.

When I started using Linux around 1996-1997, I had to calculate mode timings myself to get X to work and do all sorts of other things manually. At that time, recommending it to a non-techie would have been a great way to piss someone off. It's amazing to see that it's come such a long way in terms of usability.

Personally I run Gentoo and have been satisfied with it for some years now so you can probably see why Ubuntu/*buntu wouldn't be my personal distro of choice. But it's what I would recommend to anyone who just wants it to work anytime they need a new OS, get fed up with Windows, want to breathe some new life into an older system that's still good enough for e-mail and Web browsing, or just wants to try something different.

Re:BFT

[lolcutusofbong]

You're kidding, right? You do know the default, even from a netinstall, is a full GNOME 2.x desktop?

Re:BFT

[rgviza]

yea. why they stuck with evolution that long is a mystery to me.

Re:BFT

[bberens]

I haven't used Evolution or any other fat client in a few years but for me it was the optimum choice to give to people who were transitioning away from Outlook because it had the most familiar interface. It didn't need to be the best technical choice, it was the best pragmatic choice.

Re:BFT

[21mhz]

There is evolution-data-server, which is a data storage backend shared by many applications and applets that wish to have access to the common email/PIM data store. I usually remove the Evolution app to wipe it from the visible places like application menus, and leave e-d-s dangling there uselessly.

Re:BFT

[BitZtream]

And thats probably what everyone thinks when they heard the statement 'removing evolution from the system'.

I'm pretty sure no one actually thought it was going to forcibly uninstall it on upgrade. I can't imagine why you would assume that unless at some point in the past an Ubuntu upgrade forced an uninstall of some app? I can't say I've heard of that happening though, have you?

Re:BFT

[formfeed]

absolutely. I also agree with the commenter below,

And I agree with the comment that's going to be posted an hour from now, on how everything in Ubuntu is broken now, and unity is just he last straw, and that I'm definitely going to switch to something else soon.

Re:BFT

[xtracto]

I'm willing to bet that they aren't removing Evolution from Ubuntu but just aren't installing it by default. If you're upgrading an older system, you'll get a newer version of Evolution along with everything else.

Except that, the general concensus for *all* desktop operating systems is that *upgrading* an OS from an old version is stupid, and it is always recommended to re-install the new version after backing up the /home folder.

Well, that is exactly what everybody says in ubuntuforums.org when people bring up problems with stuff breaking after running apt-get dist-upgrade

Re:BFT

[supersloshy]

Pidgin has a lot more features than Empathy does, that's for sure, but when GNOME 3 came out I decided to make the switch... and I'm really liking it so far. Aside from not supporting blocking contacts on every protocol that Pidgin does (I think it only supports one or two protocols right now for that), it does just enough for me and it feels easier to use than Pidgin, in addition to having great GNOME 3 integration. As far as Ubuntu goes, they'd be better off using Pidgin, but every other distro, as in the GNOME 3 using ones, are much better off with Empathy in the long run. It's very pleasant to use, even if it is lacking in a few parts.

Re:BFT

[causality]

I'm willing to bet that they aren't removing Evolution from Ubuntu but just aren't installing it by default. If you're upgrading an older system, you'll get a newer version of Evolution along with everything else.

Except that, the general concensus for *all* desktop operating systems is that *upgrading* an OS from an old version is stupid, and it is always recommended to re-install the new version after backing up the /home folder.

Well, that is exactly what everybody says in ubuntuforums.org when people bring up problems with stuff breaking after running apt-get dist-upgrade

If you're going to have a function like "dist-upgrade" at all, it should work correctly. That's even more true when you produce a distribution specifically intended for nontechnical users.

Though, consider that Gentoo isn't sectioned off into versions of the distro. To update to the latest version of the distro, update your system as you normally would as part of routine maintainence. There is no format and reinstallation required (though you could do it if you just wanted to waste time). Having to do that to avoid upgrade hassles would honestly be a nuisance.

If a source distribution can do that, it should be even easier on a binary distribution. Everyone has the same compile-time options, everyone has the same mandatory dependencies, etc. There are fewer variables.

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, like Debian! /me ducks

Re:BFT

[i_ate_god]

Ultimately, what would be great, is some sort of "application store" where users can pick and chose which software they want to install after installing the OS. I mean, having a default setup that works out of the box is fine and all, but where is the choice? What if the defaults don't satisfy what I want? I'm guessing with all the complaining about default functionality, it's obvious that Ubuntu has no way of giving users choice, and the concept of a "app store", even if it's full of nothing but free alternatives, would make Ubuntu much better.

So I'm guessing that if you install Ubuntu, there is no way to switch to KDE without fully re installing the OS to use KDE (Kubuntu)?

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone really finds this funny?

Re:BFT

[Just Some Guy]

He was worried about users having to learn new applications, the implication being that he wasn't certain that they could keep using their old apps. Please try to pay attention.

Re:BFT

[Culture20]

That suggests they have some stringent standards, especially considering the number of people who have been using Thunderbird for years without issue.

What really happened is they noticed the number of people who removed evolution and installed thunderbird every time they installed a new version of Ubuntu. Eventually, numbers mean something.

Re:BFT

[SteveFoerster]

Just last night I used the Ubuntu Software Center to add LXDE to my Ubuntu-running laptop and didn't even have to reboot to check it out. Your questions make me wonder whether you've ever even seen Ubuntu.

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

ximian's attempts at OS lockin to keep revenue rolling in and thus relevance :P

One of the longest running travesties in open source development imho.

Re:BFT

[poetmatt]

I've found myself a lot more satisfied with fedora than ubuntu due to the shit which is defined as ubuntu's current UI.

Re:BFT

[Kamiza Ikioi]

That, and now dump Firefox for Chromium. Then dump Thunderbird all together and just add a link to Gmail.com.

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

Already switched, so nyah nyah nyah.

Re:BFT

[SteveFoerster]

Unless, of course, you were being facetious and I was too pre-caffeinated to see it.

Re:BFT

[JanneM]

If you're going to have a function like "dist-upgrade" at all, it should work correctly.

The operative word is "should". It will only work reliably if you basically stick with your default system, and don't do any configuration or installs outside of that framework. This is not always feasible.

In practice I've found that I can upgrade once with few side effects. The second time around is pretty much guaranteed to subtly break in various ways, so I need to do a clean install instead.

I have yet to upgrade to 11.4; I have used Unity quite a bit on another machine, and honestly, I really, really like it. It's great at just getting out of my way. I was going to wait for 11.10, but now I consider upgrading as soon as I can. Though, I will do a reinstall, not an upgrade.

Re:BFT

[Stupendoussteve]

Not all of that is Ubuntu's fault. Try to remove all of Evolution even on Gentoo and you will end up removing a good chunk of gnome as well.

Re:BFT

[semi-extrinsic]

When are we just gonna call it quits with the version crap, and go with the rolling release model? OpenSuse is already moving in that direction with Tumbleweed, others will soon follow I hope. My Archlinux box hasn't been reinstalled since Firefox 3 was brand new, and that box is still rock solid and on the bleeding edge. At this point I suspect Ubuntu is doing it just because Mark Shuttleworth has a fetish for wordplay.

Re:BFT

[LordLimecat]

It doesnt explain why those packages simply dont depend on Evolution, rather than gnome-desktop depending on evolution-data-server even after Ive ripped all of evolution, empathy, and all other dependent services out.

I mean, I thought a dependency was supposed to accurately depict what packages require others to be there; but I can inspect the package, rip out all of its files, and Im sure GDM and gnome would continue to function as I expect.

Re:BFT

[LordLimecat]

Calling debian an ubuntu derivative, even as a joke, isnt funny, its just wrong in a way that im sure causes many geeks to rage.

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

Well founded? I invite you to read on the Internet a bit about this so-called "untouchable evidence" that theory of evolution is founded on. You will be very surprised, just like me.
And also, theory of evolution is flawed by concept. Allow me to demonstrate before you dismiss me as a brainless anti-progress lunatic.
Let's say a chance of a mutation, please keep in mind the following is purely guesstimation, (not inheriting parent characteristics, actual mutation) in DNA is 1 in 10 000 000. A chance of a mutation that is survivable is 1 in 20. Out of that, of doing something more useful than original, 1 in 1 000 000. So, a chance of survivable mutation more useful than original is approximately 1 in 200 000 000 000 000.
Now, let's assume a cell splits every 20 minutes. It would take approximately 317 000 years before a SINGLE useful mutation is produced. Doesn't sound like too much compared to a billion (1 000 000 000) years, but keep in mind DNA influences whole organism. Having a mutation is like patching a live computer system. If you do it constantly, over hundreds of millions of years, flipping a bit here and another bit there in the memory and hard drive, guess what happens. That's right, if even a (relatively) simple install of Ubuntu 8.10, human-made, designed on purpose so that it doesn't break, couldn't handle updates properly, even worse stuff happens to a structure orders of magnitude more complex that DNA is.
DNA of evolving organism would degrade with each generation. Remember, usefulness is only 1 in 1000000 chance, less useful is estimated 20 times as likely. That wouldn't be evolution. That would be DEVOLUTION.
And that's working off a ready-made DNA base. Imagine life starting from scratch. That's like hoping a hurricane will arrange loose building materials into a house.
Saying evolution works is like saying that if you hang a blank sheet of paper and throw a pencil at it enough times, it will produce something buildable. Even if you actually tried to throw to produce a pattern, still doesn't work.
Lastly, any positive, evolutionary changes would be drowned out by the rest of population that hasn't got them yet. To carry on the better DNA, you need to have a starting pool. A single organism is unlikely to provide that, and even if, other (harmful) mutations would be contained within the DNA that would reduce the desirability of the new subspecies. Imagine trying to start a campaign to do something. People do not know what is it that you want, and avoid you because you are different, Same with mutated specimens.

TL;DR - theory of evolution is flawed because of mammoth improbability levels involved in development as well as improbability of propagating positive mutations throughout the species so that it actually makes a new one. Like it or not, theory of evolution is obsolete. We need stuff to replace it, and soon.What you will replace it with is no concern of mine. Once you actually know the world isn't flat, you shouldn't still teach that. Even if you don't know the alternative shape of it (yet).

Please excuse me any errors, lack of elaboration on the explanation and this kind of stuff. It's 3 AM over here and I really got to go to sleep. If in doubt, please maintain an open mind and try to mentally digest without joining the /. chorus of "evolution for the win, no scientifically viable alternative therefore immortal and untouchable".

Re:BFT

[mldi]

That, and now dump Firefox for Chromium. Then dump Thunderbird all together and just add a link to Gmail.com.

Soooo.... ChromeOS?

Re:BFT

[mldi]

I think it was around 8.04 that my dad asked me to reinstall Windows because he was tired of having to learn a new way to do things on each new version.

Then stop upgrading after an LTS release and let the good times roll for a few years.

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

Statistically you can always find someone who finds something funny

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok I am receiving contradictory information and I am definitely confused...

So am I

Then it's "no, we know how you should and should not be using your programs and listening to your audio, and I'm sorry but you have deviated away from how we want you to do things". No, I'm not accepting that. If I wanted that, I'd use Windows or OSX.

The 0.001% of users who really need to play sound remotely over a network, and absolutely cannot accomplish that task by downloading/streaming an mp3 or other audio file, is NO GOOD REASON to make a useless sound daemon the default setup for everyone. This kind of decision-making just blows my mind.

So it's not acceptable for them to tell you how to use your software, but it's acceptable to do it for that (totally made up number) 0.001% of users ? (Not that I disagree nor agree with the PulseAudio rant though, I just don't care)

Re:BFT

[Anonymous Coward]

please keep in mind the following is purely guesstimation

I should have stopped reading there ...

Saying evolution works is like saying that if you hang a blank sheet of paper and throw a pencil at it enough times, it will produce something buildable.

Saying creationism/intelligent design works is like saying that if you hang a blank sheet of paper and throw nothing at it, it will produce something buildable ...

Re:BFT

[DaVince21]

Fedora (or should I say Gnome 3?) has some Evolution integration stuff I don't care about, too, though.

Re:BFT

[garaged]

Hate to look like a troll, but I wonder why I never have this kind of trouble with debian, I can update/upgrade for years without a reinstall

That is whatit keeps me off from using ubuntu or fedora, the only thing they provide is more problems, but people keep telling to themselves debian is an old distro, slow and outdated... Bah

Re:BFT

[causality]

When are we just gonna call it quits with the version crap, and go with the rolling release model? OpenSuse is already moving in that direction with Tumbleweed, others will soon follow I hope. My Archlinux box hasn't been reinstalled since Firefox 3 was brand new, and that box is still rock solid and on the bleeding edge. At this point I suspect Ubuntu is doing it just because Mark Shuttleworth has a fetish for wordplay.

I could be wrong but I think the version crap appeals to the suits. They can easily check off their list that "Version X.YZ is supported by our IT staff". A rolling release is less suited to a bureaucracy though it's great for a hobbyist.

That's why I run Gentoo at home because I really like it, but on a production server in a corporate environment I would go with Debian.

Evolution

[geek]

I never liked Evolution. It tried too hard to be Outlook. It was just as convoluted to configure, was buggy as sin and used an enormous amount of screen real estate. Thunderbird has it's issues here also but it's been far better than Evolution for some time now. I'm probably not the target audience anymore though, I've been using webmail for some time and have no intentions of switching back to a client.

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

I just remove it and use gnome-gmail and cloudsn to integrate GMail with the ubuntu desktop. Works nicely.

Re:Evolution

[Moryath]

As a longtime Tbird (and Firefox) user... my question for the Mozilla folks is, For Fuck's Sake Why Do You Keep Breaking Plugins??

Tbird 5 broke Lightning. AGAIN. Pain in the ass for those of us who actually like the (gag, yes I know it looks like outlook) idea of keeping our calendar in the same program we keep our email, since then it's Right There when we get an email about something that needs to be noted in the calendar.

Re:Evolution

[sakdoctor]

I'm curious why you don't just use IMAP with gmail?

Gmail has the dubious honor of being the least shit webmail in the whole history of shitty webmail. But if you're on your desktop machine anyway, why not use a local application which is already wired into the notification system?
Seriously, "cloud stuff" seems to be about making solved problems more convoluted for no gain.

Re:Evolution

[fragfoo]

I have always used webmail. I always found that to use a program to fetch mail to the local machine was odd when i could just log-on somewhere from anywhere and read what i want. If theres one thing that makes sense to be in the "cloud" thats mail.

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

I just like the web interface. In mid-90s when I started using email I started with a web interface (shitty, I must admit). I just never got used to using desktop apps for this.

Re:Evolution

[icebraining]

Google's IMAP support is pretty shitty, AFAIK. At least there is plenty of complainers, and here Alpine kept losing the connection (which didn't happen with my installation of Dovecot on a home server, even when I was remote).

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Tbird 5 broke Lightning. AGAIN.

I just upgraded to TB5 yesterday. Lightning works just fine. I did have to upgrade to the 1.0b4 version from 1.0b2. But other than that, it works flawlessly.

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

If theres one thing that makes sense to be in the "cloud" thats mail.

Nothing makes sense in the cloud - nothing (unless you are using the cloud as a money-making exercise).

Re:Evolution

[malignant_minded]

I think that was the point. Evolution supports Exchange connections with plugin (not well but Outlook crashes all the time too, just not as bad) if I recall Thunderbird only supports IMAP connections.

Re:Evolution

[chrisinspace]

I use both. I sometimes like a mail client so I can check all of my email accounts simultaneously. Thunderbird lets me check both of my gmail accounts (one for real correspondence and one for newsletters, mailing lists, etc) and my university account all at once. I can also open a message from one account and forward or reply to it using a different address. I don't store any mail locally. I turn off "keep messages for this account on my computer". That's just a waste of disk space. It's also easier to purge old mail in a client when it's cleaning time. Going through page after page of gmail conversations and having to individually put a check next to each one takes forever! In a mail client you can hold shift and select a range. To quickly look at new messages from a specific account or search for a conversation gmail web interface is the way to go.

Re:Evolution

[sqldr]

It tried too hard to be Outlook

Which is ironic, because 'provider for microsoft exchange' can talk to exchange 2010, complete with calendar and addressbook. Evolution is still failing there.

Re:Evolution

[NJRoadfan]

Most of my web accounts support IMAP. Clients like Thunderbird makes it easy to check all of them in one place and to archive (restrictions limit me from forwarding mail to one account). Quite a bit faster then logging into multiple websites.

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot. Email is a perfectly good application of it. It's on remote servers, there's literally no reason to download it unless you want it to be accessible offline, or you want a backup copy. Otherwise the advantages of a content provider are immense: spreading your information over various geographical locations, which means faster access for you, a much better backup infrastructure than you can come up with at home, almost guaranteed reliability (I've seen gmail down once in my lifetime, I'm sure it has happened more than that but it has never affected me significantly).

Re:Evolution

[yarnosh]

I never understood the email-calendar connection. I don't see any advantage to having it in the same program. Switching to iCal is no more difficult than going to a different section of my email program. Generally I value keeping my email program fast and simple (thank you Mail.app). I cringe whenever I look at people's horrible email clients with a zillion different folders and functions.

Re:Evolution

[KiloByte]

Have you tried mutt then? Works everywhere with nothing but ssh, and you can customize it or add support for anything you want in a few lines of shell.

And since you're already logged in to the server, procmail with all its power is just nearby. Try to beat that with any GUI client, and especially webmail.

Re:Evolution

[repetty]

I just like the web interface. In mid-90s when I started using email I started with a web interface (shitty, I must admit). I just never got used to using desktop apps for this.

That's like driving a car by running next to it, holding on the steering wheel.

Re:Evolution

[LordLimecat]

Im not sure what you mean by "imap support is shitty". It supports IMAP; any awfulness would be caused by an awful email client (ahem, Outlook...).

Re:Evolution

[LordLimecat]

You do realize that you could consider every email server "in the cloud", right? Exchange servers for example store all the data on the server, not on the individual workstation.

Re:Evolution

[yarnosh]

But you can have both. You can sync your gmail via IMAP when at your own computer and use the web when not. A dedicated email client is just so much faster and easier to use, IMO. Plus you can easily consolidate many different email accounts. I have 4, currently. For me webmail has always been a last resort. Like nice to have, but would never want to rely on it. Even gmail is kind of clunky compared to, say, Apple Mail.

Re:Evolution

[LordLimecat]

Evolution supports skimming data from the OWA interface. That barely counts as "exchange support". Call me when they get MAPI support, otherwise Im better off simply using the web interface.

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

I have always used webmail. I always found that to use a program to fetch mail to the local machine was odd when i could just log-on somewhere from anywhere and read what i want. If theres one thing that makes sense to be in the "cloud" thats mail.

Now you listen here, sonny. Back when we were your age, we had IMAP and POP! Those were protocols that gave us data so we could make whatever interface we dang well wanted with it! We could get mail from a text interface, we could get mail from a standalone client, heck, some of us could even write our OWN dag-blasted web interface for mail! And we liked it just fine! Not like you tykes with your GMail this and "gotta have everything on your phone" that. Not a single one of you spoiled brats know what's going on in the protocols behind the scene! None of you lazy runts can appreciate that, can you? Every one, complacent with their web 2.5 AJAX HTML5 Canvas Light Flashy SVG interface or whatever it is you do these days, wastin' all your time and processor power making a web browser act like an email client we've already got! We liked our standalone clients just fine! You kids...

Re:Evolution

[nevermore94]

Yes, Thunderbird and IMAP For The Win. I have several email address that I need to continue to monitor, one which has a quite small limit and a Gmail account with its 7+ GB of space. I frequently archive my older account to my Gmail account which is a simple drag and drop in Thunderbird.

Re:Evolution

[malignant_minded]

Well Thunderbird doesn't even support that much. Also the webmail interface to certain Exchange versions does not have all the functionality if you use a browser other than IE.

Re:Evolution

[Just Some Guy]

I always found that to use a program to fetch mail to the local machine was odd

...but then you advocate fetching mail to the local machine every time you view a message. If my boss sends me a message with a large embedded image, my email client will download it in the background while I'm doing other things. It's cached locally from then on and I can access it in an instant, even while offline. With webmail, my browser will download it in the foreground whenever I click on that message. It's not cached locally outside the browser, and there's a good chance that next time I open that message I'll have to wait for the image file to download again.

I have 400GB free on my laptop hard drive, and it's several orders of magnitude faster to fetch from than my Internet connection. Why not let my computer pre-download stuff for me so that it's ready when I want to access it?

Re:Evolution

[vegiVamp]

Evolution does support MAPI, but Exchange 2010 broke it, and apparently nobody's fixing it.

Re:Evolution

[bemymonkey]

It's a holdover from the days before Gmail - back when Webmail interfaces sucked donkey balls. GMail was the first one to actually be usable, and it's still got some quirks that're annoying and non-customizable.

With a desktop client, you've got much more choice, and with Thunderbird's plugin infrastructure, more ways to customize and change things you don't like.

That said, this day and age... there's no point in using a dedicated desktop client unless you're just really used to it or an absolutely hardcore e-mail user. The GMail web interface fulfills all my needs perfectly...

Re:Evolution

[teh kurisu]

I used to use a desktop mail client, because that was how I got new mail notifications.

(I found using Gmail notification widgets that then sent you to the Gmail web page too clumsy - if there's going to be something running on my computer, it might as well be a fully fledged mail app.)

Nowadays I get my mail pushed to my phone, so I don't need a notification on my computer any more. If I want to type out an email on a computer I just go to the Gmail website. It doesn't need to be open all the time.

Re:Evolution

[Shoe Puppet]

And by the fact that IMAP is designed for a classical folder hierarchy which Gmail does not provide. I actually ditched it because I couldn't find a way to use it both via IMAP and via the Web interface that satisfied me.

Re:Evolution

[jojoba_oil]

Well Thunderbird doesn't even support that much. Also the webmail interface to certain Exchange versions does not have all the functionality if you use a browser other than IE.

And to support you with an example: OWA 2003 only offers search functionality to IE users.

Re:Evolution

[gfxguy]

Because people use email to arrange and invite many people to meetings. I don't need my daily personal schedule in my email program, but getting an email invite to a meeting, clicking "accept" and having it automatically added to my calendar is pretty nice. Sure, you could make it work that the calendar program is separate, but why bother if you're going to run both anyway? Anyway, lightening is then linked to one of my Google calendars anyway, so no matter where I go I can check my schedule. So... anyway, I can see why you might not like it, but "never understood?" It actually makes perfect sense. And this isn't evolution or outlook... even with lightening add-on, thunderbird starts up quickly and is still relatively lightweight by comparison.

Re:Evolution

[isama]

For me it is easy when making an appointment with someone so i don't even have to leave my mail client to check my availability and schedule it right away. I'm such an chaotic person that i'd forget about an appointment just because i get distracted by something in another window. So for me it makes total sense.

On the other hand, I used a macbook during my internship, and having two seperate programs was also nice.

Re:Evolution

[Dog-Cow]

I've used Outlook for over 10 years at work. I can't remember Outlook ever crashing.

Re:Evolution

[GooberToo]

So you hated something for being relevant. Nice. One post after another of people showing ignorance and bias.

Evolution is a good email client. There is absolutely nothing wrong with it. Though it has had runs of stability issues - typically caused by poor distribution management. Frankly, I find the Thunderbird interface to absolutely suck. Its a step backwards. Every single Thunderbird user I know, which is considerable (though I pointed them to it), hates the revised interface they tried to shove down their user's throats. They always prefer the original interface over the newer stuff - which really isn't saying a lot.

Bluntly, all Windows users I know dislike Thunderbird's interface but get used to it and find it usable. Nothing more. Windows users, on the other hand, quickly enjoy Evolution, especially if they have Outlook experience.

Beyond that, for a long time now, Evolution has been more or less alone in its class, for freely available email clients, which can hope to compete with the likes of Outlook.

Simple truth is, people bitch and moan about Outlook, but its a pretty decent application with lots and capabilities. Anything which comes close to providing its features is a pretty good client. For the longest time, for free clients, Evolution was pretty much the only game in town. Thunderbird now competes (last several years) with a semi-kludgy mix of plugins and add-ons. It works - usually. Many people like it. But frankly still has a ways to go before its truly an Evolution killer.

Don't confuse distribution politics with intelligent decisions. Fairly consistently they are they prove to be worlds apart.

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

You must not have a very good memory, or not very much email

Re:Evolution

[arkenian]

If much of your life is meetings, the ability to forward calendar items back and forth, and collaborate on changing them etc. is . . . well, actually, that + phone integration is probably the only reason I actually GET to most of my meetings.

Re:Evolution

[kimvette]

As is every web site, including /.

I am so sick of the "cloud" buzzword as it is completely meaningless.

Re:Evolution

[BrentH]

I don't know of any place where I tow my laptop too which has less than 10mbit, and some are even 1 gbit. Why would I even think about that, while I rarely need to browse far into my history? And I bet google optimizes common usage patterns by for example downloading the last 100 messages when logging in.

Re:Evolution

[Dr_Barnowl]

Yup, I quit using Thunderbird for two reasons

  * My office switched to Exchange ensconced behind a firewall so you could no longer use IMAP
  * Thunderbird 3 was downloading all my mail from Google multiple times, and indexing it multiple times, and presenting it in search results multiple times

Re:Evolution

[Just Some Guy]

Unless you're in a Google datacenter, I bet your end-to-end bandwidth has nothing on SATA. And if Gmail is really optimized in that way, then it will start the caching only once I open the site. Contrast with Mail.app which starts when I start my Mac and begins caching as soon as a network interface comes up. I guess I could have Gmail as a startup item, but I bet that's not nearly so common.

I'd also assert that low-bandwidth conditions are more common than high-bandwidth links. I was at a technical conference where everyone had a laptop, and you were lucky to get on at all with the convention center's Wifi. I could still use my local client and mail gradually trickled in while I was doing other stuff, but webmail would've been essentially useless. I don't go to large conferences every day, true, but I'm in poor-connectivity situations often enough that it's something I account for.

It comes down to different strokes for different folks. The best webmail (which is definitely Gmail IMHO) is much slower and clumsier than a decent local client. I'll use webmail if I have to but I much prefer the lower latency of having my mail on my hard drive.

Re:Evolution

[lolcutusofbong]

Does Mutt + Shellinabox = webmail?

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see the connection: you get an invite, click on it, the mailer sends the reply that you accept or reject while it is automatically added to your own calendar. I'm sure it's possible to have both as independent programs to do the same tasks, but there may be more of a lag in calling the other one. The necessity to synchronize your own calendar with other people's makes it convenient to keep it with the mail client since it's the channel through which most of the official communication is done.

In an independent e-mail program and calendar setting, the e-mail client would still need to identify an e-mail invite as such, and be able to handle the correct reply as well as notify the calendar program to add a new date. Similarly the calendar has to be able to call the mail client to notify attendees and yes probably have access to the address book also to add attendees to the calendar. These are very useful functions.

Re:Evolution

[bberens]

I would add contacts as an additional tie that binds. E-mail and calendar are both heavily reliant on contacts. Maintaining that in duplicate would be silly.

Re:Evolution

[bberens]

You could configure your gmail account to do that for you automatically. You can even send e-mail from your other account using the gmail interface.

Re:Evolution

[yarnosh]

Because people use email to arrange and invite many people to meetings. I don't need my daily personal schedule in my email program, but getting an email invite to a meeting, clicking "accept" and having it automatically added to my calendar is pretty nice.

Oh, Apple Mail already imports meetings into iCal for me. Not really necessary to have them in one program. Actually, I recently added CalDAV connection directly to Google calendar. Now I don't even depend on email to get invites. Email is completely detached from calendar for my uses.

Sure, you could make it work that the calendar program is separate, but why bother if you're going to run both anyway?

Well, I have my programming IDE open most of the time and Email too. Why not combine those? Just because you have two programs running doesn't mean it makes sense to combine them.

So... anyway, I can see why you might not like it, but "never understood?"

I still really don't get it. There's no real problem combining them. It just always seemed odd that so many people take it for granted that they would be combined.

Re:Evolution

[shaiay]

The email calender connection is simple -- email is used for invitations. invitations to events are sent via email, and the invited parties can accept, decline and such, also through emails.

While this can be done using separate email and calendar apps, where the calender is a viewer for invites that the email app receives, and the calendar app sends invites/replies to invites directly using the MTA, it's much more convenient to be able to just be able to see the invite in the email app, see if it conflicts with an existing event, and click "accept" ro decline or whatever, all in the email app, in the message view pane.

Re:Evolution

[BitZtream]

You do realize that Tags in the web interface are exposed as folders on the IMAP side ... and they can be nested just like folders ... right?

I've been using gmail for years, I have at least 3 levels deep of folders (Year -> Month -> General or TopicBasedFolder) under the inbox.

I can access them both in my desktop client (Apple Mail, Thunderbird, and Outlook, depending on the OS at the moment).

Re:Evolution

[Matthieu Araman]

I don't understand your remark. There was a lighning version out just after TB5 just to make TB+lighning users working.
See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/calendar/2011/07/lightning_10b4_has_been_releas.html

Re:Evolution

[yarnosh]

The email calender connection is simple -- email is used for invitations. invitations to events are sent via email, and the invited parties can accept, decline and such, also through emails.

But why? Wouldn't a dedicated protocol be better? LIke CalDAV? You need something like this to be able to do things like view people's availability BEFORE sending the invite. How do you do this if you're using the MTA only to pass around invites? The nice thing about a seperate calendar protocol is that it allows you to use whatever email client you want and wahtever calendar you want. You don't have to try to find one program that does everything perfectly they way you like. That always annoyed me in corporate environments because you're forced to use crap like Outlook or Lotus Notes. And it is doubly worse if you're nto using Windows.

it's much more convenient to be able to just be able to see the invite in the email app, see if it conflicts with an existing event, and click "accept" ro decline or whatever, all in the email app, in the message view pane.

No easier than your calendar program notifying you that you have a new invite and asking you if you want to accept. I don't really see the difference or the advantage of having it in a message pane in you email program.

Re:Evolution

[BitZtream]

Because to coordinate meetings via iCal (or exchange), everyone has to be on the same iCal (or exchange) server/cluster. Your iCal server won't connect to my iCal server to tell it about the meetings you want to coordinate. gmail/google apps for your domain allow you to cross boundaries slightly, but only because you're really still on the same 'server'. Your gmail ical server still won't talk to mine.

Or ...

You can email specially formatted messages to each other with the meeting information.

And thats why you want email integration. So you can just auto-email the information, and other clients see the message, parse it, handle the request as if it was done via iCal.

Thunderbird and its relation can't just pop off to the built in OS sendmail method because one of the OSes they favor doesn't have a built in standard API for sending and checking mail that is easily configurable by a desktop user.

Lightning on a Mac or Windows could certainly just use the built in stuff to access mailboxes ... well, assuming that the user is also using an app that properly uses the OS native interfaces (Apple Mail and Outlook or any other MAPI based client on Windows). Sure, gnome may have integration methods as does KDE ... but why reinvent the wheel, you need a gecko engine for lightning anyway, might as well just piggy back it on an email client you can target that works across all your supported OSes and provides you a consistent interface to access messages ... and interface which SOMEONE ELSE maintains the OS native integration with.

How many times do you want to have to tell software your email account info?

Consider SMTP a backup transport for iCal data when not using a shared server, thats why it requires email integration (or at least, thats why it has it).

Re:Evolution

[MaskedSlacker]

I use gmail's interface because no email client I know of can match the utility of automatic labels and multiple inboxes in tandem. I can sorta fudge it with folders and filters, but I can't get four separate inboxes displayed simultaneously on the screen, and even then folders don't match the utility of gmail's labels where I can label every email with multiple labels based on a variety of factors (which email address it was sent to, what topic-category it falls under, etc).

Re:Evolution

[BitZtream]

See heres the thing, when your Internet connection goes down or your providers webmail servers are down ...

I can still read, send and reply to messages.

I can read anything my client already has cached, because I don't need to get data from the server.

I can send and reply and my client will be happy to queue the message and send it the instant the server becomes available without me doing anything.

My email client knows about incoming messages the instant they hit my inbox, thanks to IMAP NOTIFY, so it tells me when I have mail, I don't have to check it.

I can always access my IMAP mailbox via any one of a dozen web mail clients that allow you to connect to any server and access all my mail.

I'm not continually wasting bandwidth just viewing messages.

I have a choice of email clients I can use, each with many unique features and many that allow me to extend them in trivial ways all the way to complete overhaul should I want.

I have every single feature you have and many many more.

Re:Evolution

[MaskedSlacker]

What about emails with multiple labels that have a non-hierarchical relationship? For example, I might have an email tagged [Amazon][Billing] for my Amazon Web Services invoices. As I have it set up those are orthogonal tags. Not everything tagged [Billing] is tagged [Amazon] (and vice versa). Put another way they are intersecting sets, and one is not a subset of the other. There is no real way to do this with IMAP folders.

Re:Evolution

[BitZtream]

Then you drink too much ... or don't actually do anything in outlook.

Re:Evolution

[yarnosh]

Because to coordinate meetings via iCal (or exchange), everyone has to be on the same iCal (or exchange) server/cluster. Your iCal server won't connect to my iCal server to tell it about the meetings you want to coordinate. gmail/google apps for your domain allow you to cross boundaries slightly, but only because you're really still on the same 'server'. Your gmail ical server still won't talk to mine.

Using a calendar protocol instead of SMTP allows me to do neato nifty things like check people's availability before sending an invite. If you rely on email to exchange calendar events, then you miss out on a whole lot of calendar functionality.

Or ... You can email specially formatted messages to each other with the meeting information.

I can do both. Apple Mail understands calendar invites and adds them to my iCal. But normally I prefer to use the CalDAV connection to the companies Goggle domain for day to day stuff.

Thunderbird and its relation can't just pop off to the built in OS sendmail method because one of the OSes they favor doesn't have a built in standard API for sending and checking mail that is easily configurable by a desktop user.

Ideally your calendar server would handle all that for you.

. but why reinvent the wheel, you need a gecko engine for lightning anyway,

Should it use the gecko engine at all?

might as well just piggy back it on an email client you can target that works across all your supported OSes and provides you a consistent interface to access messages ... and interface which SOMEONE ELSE maintains the OS native integration with.

I tend to give a heavy preferrence to native software. I prefer software that can integrate well with the desktop over software that looks the same on all platforms. I don't really care what Mail/Calendar look like to WIndows users. I'm using a Mac.

How many times do you want to have to tell software your email account info?

The point is that I don't think SMTP is an appropriate for sharing calendars. So... just once. My calendar server should take care of talking to other people for me.

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

in web-Gmail you can also hold shift and select a range. Yeah, it shows only 100 messages at a time, but it works. You can also define a search and select all messages that match it.

Re:Evolution

[icebraining]

All I know is that Alpine (no, not Outlook, ugh) couldn't hold the connection open, while it had no problems doing the same with Dovecot.

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolutions has a tonne of technical debt. In the last few years the developers have been working hard to swap out old libraries with new ones. I guess that they didn't have time to fix the gui as well.

Re:Evolution

[gfxguy]

Well, I have my programming IDE open most of the time and Email too. Why not combine those?

Because those two things are completely unrelated, unlike event invites that arrive via email and, as someone else pointed out, the contacts involved? But really, if your IDE had a satisfactory email or calendar plug in, why not? I know people who login and launch emacs and never leave it - they do mail and everything else. I don't like it, but I would never say "I don't get it" just because it's not how I like having things configured.

Re:Evolution

[styrotech]

They've had a MAPI plugin for years. It was the only way to connect to Exchange 2007 - the old OWA plugin only worked with 2003 and earlier.

And their is yet another plugin being developed to support Exchange Web Services now that MS is deprecating/dropping MAPI.

Personally I think the reason Ubuntu is dropping Evolution is that they can't be bothered fixing bugs that can't be pushed upstream because Ubuntu introduced them.

Re:Evolution

[Stupendoussteve]

You are correct. The IMAP client will download the email multiple times in multiple folders, and if you delete it from one Gmail will helpfully delete the message from the others rather than just removing that label (as has been my experience). Of course, I don't know how it really could work better than that, because on Gmail when you remove all of the labels (even inbox) it treats it as archived.

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

I just use Thunderbird with a calendar plugin, and synch it to my gmail with the Gmail connector plugin. Address books, mail, calendar, the whole shebang, synchonised accross Windows, Linux and OSX!

Now all they have to do is ditch that stupid notepad application Tomboy and they could drop out the Mono framework too.

Re:Evolution

[dkf]

I don't need my daily personal schedule in my email program, but getting an email invite to a meeting, clicking "accept" and having it automatically added to my calendar is pretty nice.

But why does that require lots of integration?

Sure, you could make it work that the calendar program is separate, but why bother if you're going to run both anyway?

What's that got to do with anything? I run a window manager all the time, but I don't want my text editor, browser, email client, calendar, word processor, and compiler tool chain all integrated with it. What's wrong with having a program that does one task well?! It's the Unix way after all.

Re:Evolution

[LordLimecat]

Exchange 2007, however, gives that functionality to all browsers, and Exchange 2010 presents an identical interface across all browsers. Its interface, incidentally, is vastly superior to Evolution.

Re:Evolution

[JanneM]

If theres one thing that makes sense to be in the "cloud" thats mail.

Well, mostly. It still occasionally fails for the same reason most cloud-only services still fail: you can't access it when you aren't online. When is that? Travel:

* Going from Osaka to Tokyo I would have Wifi access if I was prepared to pay for a separate account - and if the Wifi is up, and if the train has a good connection, and the connection-gnomes are in a good mood. Mostly I'm off-line during those hours.

* Long flights. No wifi, no mobile reception. No access to anything online, for twelve hours at a time.

* International travel. Often no Wifi - especially during transit - and roaming is far too expensive for mere mortals to pay. We only have one home, and I'm not sure mortgaging it would cover a week of mobile charges abroad.

Why is travel important? Because I (and I guess many other people) get and keep their travel-related information in the form of emails and calendar items - itineraries, booking confirmations, contact information, access maps and so on. It doesn't do me much good floating in the cloud if I can't access it when I need it.

Perhaps some years from now we'll have ubiquitous online access, access that is reliable, affordable and without the risk of sticker shock and hidden charges no matter where you come from and where you go. Perhaps. Until then, I'll just make sure all my information is accessible and editable locally.

Re:Evolution

[dupeisdead]

weird how an 8 year old software product doesn't support other newer browsers properly eh? :P

Re:Evolution

[WuphonsReach]

I never understood the email-calendar connection.

Then you've never been a heavy user of calendars to schedule meetings / events where you need to quickly check whether:

a) Everyone can actually meet on that date (no matter what was said before hand, until you put a date down on the calendar people simply don't check)

b) The resource is open at that time (useful in situations where you need to reserve a meeting room)

c) Change an event to a new location / time and not end up with a few people showing up at the wrong place or the wrong time

etc.

By tying the calendar process into the communication client (and *everyone* has an email client), you give the calendar application a way to communicate quickly with those people who are scheduled to attend an event. Since everyone uses email, it's a natural fit.

(If *everyone* had the same brand of instant messenger, then we could use that instead.)

Re:Evolution

[Anonymous Coward]

If I get an e-mail with a http-adress, then I can use my mail client to start my browser. That doesn't require integration.

If I want to plan a meeting, then I ought to be able to use my calendar as a starting point to open my e-mail client, but I don't see why this rrequires lowlevel integration.

If I recieve a mail that contains an date or an ics-file, then I should be able to use my e-mail client as a starting point to open my calendar, but it must be possible to do this using an API, that doesn't require the kind of lowlevel integration that you have in evolution right now.
.

About time

[sakdoctor]

I like "close to how I set things up anyway", so that I don't have to fight against stupid defaults all the time. Purge evolution, purge empathy, install thunderbird, install pidgin. Done. That was the appeal of Ubuntu.

Though they've jumped the shark with unity, so ... I'll switch to Debian now I guess.

Re:About time

[geek]

That's what I used to do also. I hate Empathy with a passion. More and more though I am using google talk in the web browser since I have a gmail tab open all the time anyway. I also switched to Arch thanks to all this Unity stuff. If they tighten Unity up though I'll give it another try. It's pretty horrible right now though.

Re:About time

[rubycodez]

I bought I second hard disk just so I can prepare my exodus from Ubuntu (vmware workstation isn't suitable, need to work with the native devices). I switched over to Xubuntu for now, but am configuring the Debian XFCE from the XFCE/LXDE disk in my spare time. More loose ends to deal with than Ubuntu, such as usb device plugging permissions and 32 bit libraries needed for some things to work on amd64. But thus far forums have all the solutions. Don't bother with the LXDE, that's like a beta that still needs more work especially in the system management / config tools.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean with pulse-audio (and now indicator-applet), removing that crap isn't even optional anymore, if you want a functional desktop.

Re:About time

[MonsterTrimble]

What really worries me is that a lot of the KDE people are putting resources into Telepathy and that Plasmoid thingy instead of working on Kopete. Kopete used to be light years ahead of everyone else, having webcam capability as well as a really attractive UI. I also adored the multiple profiles it supported. I first started pulling away when Pidgin gained facebook chat capability and Kopete took months to gain it. The last time I tried it on my LXDE laptop it wouldn't play nice with the message notifications. I could try it again but why? Pidgin is pretty close to having everything Kopete had and I have accepted the ugly ugly UI that Pidgin has. It's a pity though.

Re:About time

[chrisinspace]

Here here...I hate Evolution. As a mail client, it's OK. I tried it and it had some nice features, but I could never get it where I liked it as much as Thunderbird. What drives me nuts about Evolution though, is that if you try to remove it, you get all kinds of dependency errors. The system basically tells you that you have to remove Gnome to get Evolution completely out.

Re:About time

[Machtyn]

Yep - that's the same for me, too. Since I'm still a Linux newb, it's "figure out how to purge Evolution and Empathy, figure out how to integrate Thunderbird".

Re:About time

[LordLimecat]

Its very likely that the folks working Plasma are not the folks who worked on Kopete nor the folks who work on amaroK, etc.

Re:About time

[geek]

Open Ubuntu Software Center, click on Installed Software on the left side. Selected Evolution, click remove. No dependency issues.

Re:About time

[Tarlus]

Dunno, I kinda like the way LXDE is set up now. I do agree that its configuration could be reorganized a bit but it's a great way to go lighter than XFCE without losing too much functionality. Yes, I said it, my hardware needs something lighter than XFCE...

Re:About time

[CastrTroy]

Dependancy hell is terrible in Linux. I was trying to remove MySQL in Kubuntu, to install Percona, and it told me that it had to remove all of KDE if I wanted to remove MySQL. And I couldn't install Percona because it conflicted with MySQL. I understand some advantages of shared libraries, but sometimes they cause a lot of grief.

Re:About time

[TangoMargarine]

Why do you consider the Pidgin UI ugly? Yeah, it's rather Fisher Price, but it's pretty much the easiest-to-use program I've ever seen.

Re:About time

[rubycodez]

with LXDE I also hit the issues of partial redraw/refresh of desktop at times, and sometimes the panel runs CPU to 100% and it sticks there.....these things will get fixed (if they haven't been already), and I will be keeping my eye on LXDE from now on

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution -> Thunderbird
Empathy -> Pidgin
Unity -> GNOME 2/3
Shotwell -> digiKam (KDE app)

Re:About time

[MonsterTrimble]

Windows 2K artwork (including grey on grey background), Times New Roman text, no profile pics, no messenger service icons. Going to that from Kopete which had theme integration, and all of the settings turned on by default is definitely a downgrade.

Re:About time

[TangoMargarine]

Pidgin has options for all those, easily accessible. IIRC profile pics are even enabled by default, and I don't know what you're talking about in regards to W2K.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

I like Linux Mint myself. You might give it a shot if Ubuntu and Unity is not to your liking.

http://www.linuxmint.com/

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

Anything that doesn't work with fuckfacebook gets my vote.

Re:About time

[Anonymous Coward]

" I first started pulling away when Pidgin gained facebook chat capability and Kopete took months to gain it."

Thank you for making my day.
Facebook uses regular XMPP connections. The facebook option in Pidgin is like the Gtalk one, a way to make configuration easier.
So, Kopete always had facebook support since facebook introduced chat. You just had to configure properly the server of an XMPP account.

Re:About time

[MonsterTrimble]

Yes, they do (except for friend's profile pic on the chat list), however I was comparing Kopete to Pidgin out of the box. With the W2K artwork I was refering to the stock color on *buntu based systems and the really boxy windows. I normally like the basic look (I use Lubuntu currently - quick and very little fluff) but the downgrade at that time was harsh. Actually, I noticed that Pidgin is finally handling Yahoo file transfers again.

Excellent

[healyp]

Now if they'll just put pidgin back in instead of empathy.

Re:Excellent

[srobert]

sudo apt-get install pidgin
sudo apt-get remove empathy

Download

[Dan East]

You can download the second alpha of Ubuntu 11.10 today and give Thunderbird a whirl.

Wow, you have to download and install an entire OS distribution to try an email client.

Re:Download

[geek]

If you wish to see how they are integrating it into the OS, yes. Duh

Re:Download

[mrand]

If you wish to just try it without seeing how they are integrating it into the OS, no. Duh

https://launchpad.net/~mozillateam/+archive/thunderbird-stable

Re:Download

[MMC Monster]

You think that's bad? It doesn't even do anything unless you put it ON A COMPUTER!

Re:Download

[sourcerror]

You must be new to computers. You have to install an entire OS to use Outlook as well.

Re:Download

[Anonymous Coward]

How you see how they have intergated mozilla thunderbird to Linux kernel by downloading Ubuntu alpha?

How you exactly see how software is integrated to other software? Especially software to operating systems like Linux (Linux kernel)?

Mozilla Thunderbird is not integrated to OS. It is themed and configured so it fits to GNOME and Unity. It has nothing else to do with the operating system than operating system just operates the hardware resources and manages them to other software like bash, glibc, gnome, mozilla thunderbird.

You see the Linux kernel is *the* Linux operating system.

To give you a understanding what you said:

"If you wish to see how they are integrating it [radio] into the [car] engine, yes. Duh"

Technically you are so wrong...

Re:Download

[Danathar]

Are you sure you are not thinking of Emacs?

I am not surprised....

[cyberkahn]

I just haven't seen any significant innovation Evolution for some time now. I switched to Thunderbird a long time ago and haven't missed Evolution one bit. For one, the extensions support for Thunderbird makes it more appealing not to mention the ability to choose what is and isn't in my mail client. For example, if don't want to do calendaring from Thunderbird I don't add the extension.

Re:I am not surprised....

[ilsaloving]

So what you're saying is, Evolution hasn't evolved?

Re:I am not surprised....

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he's saying that Evolution was not intelligently designed

Re:I am not surprised....

[cyberkahn]

Yes :-)

Re:I am not surprised....

[cyberkahn]

Even better. :-)

Re:I am not surprised....

[ilsaloving]

*golf clap*

Bravo!

Re:I am not surprised....

[21mhz]

Evolution has been pretty stagnant feature-wise for the last 6-7 years at least.
It was quickly put together by the folks at Ximian. Then, after Ximian was bought by Novell, it was handed off to a bunch of hapless Novell employees, who didn't seem to know what to do with it. In the recent years there has been some activity, but it looks like the codebase bogs down any attempts to change it.

Re:I am not surprised....

[Anonymous Coward]

The evolution developers have been knee deep in technical debt. They have spend the last couple of years exchanging the libraries one by one starting with bonobo. I hope that they eventually reach a state where they can start working on the user interface. The long term goal should be to split evolution in to four applications.

best native KDE mailer?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried evolution and it's OK, but really want a good native KDE program. Kmail, to put it bluntly, sucks and is full of so many bugs it's almost unusable.

Does anyone have a good recommendation?

Re:best native KDE mailer?

[medlefsen]

KMail is the only "native" mail app but, unlike gnome, KDE works well with thunderbird. With a little effort you can even make it use the KDE theme and dialogs. Not 100% ideal, but maybe 95%. And, after switching, I've been able to stop thinking about my mail client and actually get some work done.

Multiplatform Software

[Damnshock]

I believe it to be a good move from Canonical as you could find the same software on Windows

Besides, it can't be worse than Evolution :P

Regards

Re:Multiplatform Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they should rename Evolution: Intelligent_Design

Or as an alternative...

[emuls]

apt-get install thunderbird (or your distro's equivalent)

It's about time...

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously. I welcome the date when evolution and it's bloat hit the trash bucket. It was always a software roulette determining if removing the evolution package would "convienently" uninstall 90% of Gnome.

Re:It's about time...

[Knuckles]

It was always a software roulette determining if removing the evolution package would "convienently" uninstall 90% of Gnome.

You're the 5th poster or so who mentions this, and at least on Ubuntu 11.04 it is just not true:

aptitude -s purge evolution
The following packages will be REMOVED:
    evolution{p}
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 1.196 kB will be freed.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
    evolution-exchange: Depends: evolution (>= 2.32.2) but it is not going to be installed.
                                            Depends: evolution ( 2.33.0) but it is not going to be installed.
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

          Remove the following packages:
1) evolution-exchange

          Leave the following dependencies unresolved:
2) evolution-common recommends evolution
3) ubuntu-desktop recommends evolution
4) ubuntu-desktop recommends evolution-exchange

Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?] y
The following packages will be REMOVED:
    evolution{p} evolution-exchange{a}
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 2 to remove and 4 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 3.535 kB will be freed.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y
Would download/install/remove packages.
abc@comp:~$

Re:It's about time...

[Anonymous Coward]

The keyword is "evolution-data-server".

Try to remove it.

OMG aptitude wants to remove your bladder as a dependency!

Re:It's about time...

[Knuckles]

The keyword is "evolution-data-server".

Try to remove it.

OMG aptitude wants to remove your bladder as a dependency!

Are you just parroting what you hear from others, or do you tell lies on purpose?

aptitude -s remove evolution-data-server
The following packages will be REMOVED:
    evolution-data-server
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 1 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B of archives. After unpacking 1.843 kB will be freed.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
    evolution: Depends: evolution-data-server (>= 2.32.2) but it is not going to be installed.
                          Depends: evolution-data-server ( 2.33.0) but it is not going to be installed.
The following actions will resolve these dependencies:

          Remove the following packages:
1) evolution
2) evolution-exchange

          Leave the following dependencies unresolved:
3) evolution-common recommends evolution
4) gnome-control-center recommends evolution-data-server
5) ubuntu-desktop recommends evolution
6) ubuntu-desktop recommends evolution-exchange
7) gnome-panel recommends evolution-data-server

Accept this solution? [Y/n/q/?]

So, that's one thing. The other is that evolution-data-server is not evolution. It's a tiny server that makes sure of integration between, e.g., that calendar panel applet and evolution. It's absolutely no problem to remove evo and leave e-d-s installed. In fact, the whole reason to split this out from evo was to ease up on dependencies.

See, people need to decide if they want a tightly integrated distro (which does what modern OSes do, like give access to the calendar application via the panel), or a distro that is nothing more than a bunch of apps on a disk. If they want the former, they must stop complaining that they cannot remove/exchange every single thing. If the latter I don't know why they even use Ubuntu.

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer it greatly myself, but Evolution is stagnant. Maybe this will motivate them.

Good!

[danbuter]

One of the first things I always did when I was updating Ubuntu was install Thunderbird. It's a great program. I also use it on my Win7 computer.

what about exchange support

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an effort to support exchange web services in evolution with the new evolution-ews plugin. Does Thunderbird have anything like this?

Re:what about exchange support

[Tarlus]

The best luck I've had in Thunderbird is to use the 'Exchange Provider for Lightning' add-on to support an Exchange calendar, and then hoping like hell the Exchange server has the IMAP service running for mail. But that's about it.

In other news:

[macson_g]

In other news: desktop mail clients lost 92% of marketshare to web-based stuff.

Re:In other news:

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what I don't get. The last time I used an actual email client it was pine. I've used only webmail since 1999.

Re:In other news:

[Anonymous Coward]

What remains is the best 8% :)

Re:In other news:

[betterunixthanunix]

A lot of "power users" use email programs like Thunderbird. I know that a lot of people like Google's approach to threads in Gmail, but to be perfectly honest I prefer a tree view, particularly on busy mailing lists where conversations often fork. I also don't know of any webmail clients that discourage top posting, nor any which have decent Usenet support (yes, there are still good conversations on technical topics on Usenet). There is also the issue of being unable to use PGP or S/MIME with your webmail, excepting a few cheap hacks like FireGPG (yes, it is a cheap hack) and snake-oil solutions like Hushmail.

Re:In other news:

[lolcutusofbong]

Claws Mail does all of those things. I use it myself, and it kicks butt.

Re:In other news:

[Culture20]

Slashdot doesn't either.

I also don't know of any webmail clients that discourage top posting

Exchange connectivity?

[dousette]

How does Thunderbird 5 handle full Exchange connectivity (including Calendaring, Contacts, Tasks, etc)? That is my main reason for sticking with Evolution.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[sqldr]

Flaky, but it works.. most of the time :-) Even with 2010

http://gitorious.org/lightning-exchange-provider/pages/Home

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[jawtheshark]

As far as I know: not at all. You get POP3, IMAP and I think a few connectors to free email systems (But I'm not sure those are still required, at least GMail allows IMAP) Even the lightning pluging doesn't seem to work well for calendaring.

If you're locked to Exchange, the only way to get it on Linux is use Evolution and last time I did that, it had to be done using OWA. That might have changed, though... That was a long time ago.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[blizz017]

Unfortunately some of us are still stuck with Exchange 2003, so we're still SOL for the most part.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[repetty]

How does Thunderbird 5 handle full Exchange connectivity (including Calendaring, Contacts, Tasks, etc)? That is my main reason for sticking with Evolution.

Flaky, but it works.. most of the time :-) Even with 2010

So you're saying it's just like Outlook... cool.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[LordNimon]

You can use DavMail to convert Exchange into IMAP/POP/CalDav/LDAP.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 davmail is great

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an email client. Why would an email client talk to a calendar or todo-task server? Thunderbird isn't Emacs.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

It can be done but you'll need a few things:

1. DavMail (free Java-based app that runs in the background, this talks to Exchange)
2. Install the Lightning plugin (for calendar)
3. You'll need to update a few things to get address lookup/auto-completion working properly as well:
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/tb3_1_ldap_search_in_address_book_works_but_no_auto_completion#reply_5942308

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[Derek Pomery]

I also rely on davmail + thunderbird after struggling for years with evolution - both MAPI and webdav integration.

It never worked right, regardless of patches tested and protocol used. It corrupted messages, it crashed,it lost messages, calendaring was almost always non-functional save for a brief period before they upgraded Exchange then I lost it again.

DavMail works beautifully, including calendaring using Lightning.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/gmail-conversation-view/

I'm also a big fan of this addon - gives it kinda that gmail feel we are more familiar with now.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on your version of exchange. 2007/2010 weren't supported at all two months ago. So if you're eight years behind, you're golden, otherwise, you're boned. At least OWA 2010+ are fully compatible with non-IE browsers.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[Mr. McGibby]

How does Evolution handle full Exchange connectivity (including Calendaring, Contacts, Tasks, etc)? That is my main reason for sticking with Thunderbird.

Evolution integration with Exchange is bit f'ing crapshoot. I was constantly having problems with it. Bugs never got fixed. I went with Thunderbird and the calender plugin, and I'm happy now.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[tokul]

How does Thunderbird 5 handle full Exchange connectivity (including Calendaring, Contacts, Tasks, etc)? That is my main reason for sticking with Evolution.

How does Evolution handle basic email functionality (including email storage). Abysmal mailbox performance and 2GB mbox format restriction was my main reason for ditching Evolution in older Ubuntu setups before mainstream got the message.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[think_nix]

How does Thunderbird 5 handle full Exchange connectivity (including Calendaring, Contacts, Tasks, etc)? That is my main reason for sticking with Evolution.

http://davmail.sourceforge.net/

Works rather well except for some calendar glitches .

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://davmail.sourceforge.net/ DavMail is your friend. Unfortunately, Lightning hasn't been updated in some time and I've found it to be quite buggy. Still, the option is there!

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[jrumney]

Does Exchange still not work properly with standard IMAP and iCal? That used to be a problem when I used it in 2003, but I thought they'd improved lately.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually if you are on Exchange 2010 MS broke connections to evolution. Before our company upgraded Exchange Evolution worked great. Now I have no calendar and I use Thunderbird to "get" my mail using an IMAP connection. My suggestion to the company is dump Exchange but they aren't going to do that.

Re:Exchange connectivity?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know: not at all. You get POP3, IMAP and I think a few connectors to free email systems (But I'm not sure those are still required, at least GMail allows IMAP)

Yahoo now offers IMAP too.

Addressbook

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm really surprised they're doing this before they fix Thunderbird's Addressbook. How they still have not implemented allowing as many email addresses as you want to add for a person is beyond me.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=118665

Re:Addressbook

[Just Some Guy]

And along those lines, I wish they'd decouple message preferences from the address book. For example, I get a sales newsletter from an online computer parts retailer we all know and love, and the only way to tell Thunderbird to always display the images from that sender is to add them to my address book and set an option there. Why, oh why? Thunderbird already uses SQLite for other stuff, so why can't it have a table like showimages (address varchar, show boolean) instead of making me litter my contact database?

Re:Addressbook

[Anonymous Coward]

Or how about this shite?

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Sharing_address_books

"Early versions of Thunderbird let you replace the 'abook.mab' filename with a full pathname to specify the address book was stored on a file share. That would let multiple users and/or machines use a single copy. However, that functionality no longer works and there is no indication that it will ever be restored."

That whole URL just reads like a nightmare of half-done, abandoned, "won't bother, who cares, why would you want to do that."

Re:Addressbook

[Anonymous Coward]

I just created a separate contact database called "collected address" and put them all in there.

Re:Addressbook

[Anonymous Coward]

If that's the bug that's holding you back, you've never used Evolution. That bug, while bothersome, is insignificant to the hordes of crap that Evolution refused to fix.

The Evolution bug that bothered me the most was th longstanding Evolution 32 bit bug that somehow manages to affect the filesystem such that mailboxes/files over 2gb. Do you know how often a mailbox goes beyond 2gb these days?

You'd download, it bonked. Files then got redirected into the general inbox instead of the folder it was supposed to filter to. You'd then have to refilter that if you could. If you had an archive pop mailbox that you had duplicate out that you were dumping, it'd fail on the download sometimes if it couldn't redirect to the inbox..

People screamed to hell and back for this to be fixed. That bug would usually encompass 2-3 threads at a time, totally 50 comments to get it fixed, on their bug reporting system last I looked (which was over a year ago). They completely and utterly refused, even removing the bug or stating it was fixed. Unbelievable that no developer could figure it out, and if I recall, Evolution for a time had Corel or something support, so they had paid developers that didn't give a hoot. I use Ubuntu's LTS and through the various upgrades during LTS over 5 years, and so far, this bug hasn't gotten fixed.

I think they believe that since most people are going to 64bit and the bug doesn't exist there, it'll be a non-issue if they wait long enough. Or maybe the developers just don't use 32bit machines. I don't know. Maybe they've fixed it since I last checked, but I figured 5 years was long enough complaining and moved on to something else.

So if Thunderbird is any good, easy to set up, and works as an emailer, damn good move.

Thunderbird is the best for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

The only decent mail client on Linux is Thunderbird. Everything else crashes, locks up, and doesn't set up as easy.

I've tried 'em all and every major release, I try them again - same result every time so far: crap.

Re:Thunderbird is the best for Linux

[Nadaka]

what about pine? I know it is old as hell, but I never had problems with it.

Re:Thunderbird is the best for Linux

[ChrisMP1]

Everything else crashes,

I use Mutt. It's never crashed for me.

locks up,

I use Mutt. It's never locked up for me.

and doesn't set up as easy.

I use... ah hell, carry on. I would probably crash if I lost my muttrc...

Re:Thunderbird is the best for Linux

[UltraZelda64]

Pegasus Mail, although it is a Windows program, seems to run fine in Linux under Wine and is very nice, full-featured, and fast. If only there was a native version.

Re:Thunderbird is the best for Linux

[MBGMorden]

Pine is text based. If you're not sure why a modern user wouldn't want to use a text-based email client then all hope is lost.

Re:Thunderbird is the best for Linux

[rishistar]

I'm more than happy using the Opera browser mail client.

Re:Thunderbird is the best for Linux

[semi-extrinsic]

What? Are you saying now that I've finally polished my mutt setup, I'm not going to want to use it? :(

Re:Thunderbird is the best for Linux

[garaged]

I have used mutt a few years now, it is my primary MUA for work, but has crashed on me, even in the las couple of days

Setup is not that complicated, but like vim/emacs, you never stop leaning how to use it, I just learned a couple of new tricks from a friend.

I gotta say that the best thing about mutt is the efficiency and that even when it crashes, it starts up as fast as always, it doesnt get corrupted as the other complex mail clents

Re:Thunderbird is the best for Linux

[ChrisMP1]

"like vim/emacs, you never stop learning how to use it" - That's for sure. It's the main reason I love mutt. You do get in the habit of using it, though - I've sent a couple emails with other programs with ":wq[enter]y" in them...

I can never find the documentation for setting it up with SSL-encrypted IMAP (for gmail). That's why it's a pain for me to set up. I keep my muttrc backed up now

Finally

[Arancaytar]

I've been using Thunderbird forever, and have been hating Ubuntu's insistent pushing of Evolution as long. It can be disabled, but its backend is integrated with the gnome panel and calendar, which is impossible to connect with Thunderbird. Worse, Evolution is inferior where features, addons as well as IMAP are concerned (I haven't tested Evolution's POP). Synchronization takes forever, the folder structure is rigid and clashes with that of Googlemail, and the interface periodically freezes when displaying large folders.

Getting rid of it almost makes up for Unity, but not quite.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Fellow evolution and ubuntu-hater here, but you're actually a bit unfair to canonical in this case. The entanglement of the mail-client with the desktop is *not* the doing of Canonical, it seems to be more of a result by the general retardedness and incompetence of the Gnome developers, since it's the same in any other distribution.

Re:Finally

[callmebill]

How often do you have to install Ubuntu?

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Evolution has always been fastest and best IMAP client for me (Exchange and GMail POP and IMAP when it came). Thunderbird is slow and it can be a bitch about connection (perfect network connection and still rolling minutes the "sending" status).

Evolution Dependencies

[Curunir_wolf]

Good news! Now if they could just rip out all those Evolution dependencies, maybe I could install a functional Gnome desktop without all the Evolution crap that I never use.

It's good, but

[Compaqt]

Agree.

I like Thunderbird because:
-I like to keep the same apps across platforms
-The availability of plugins
-The fact that plugins can be programmed more easily than for Evolution (do they have them? are they done in C?)

Yet at the same time, this continues the general theme of Ubuntu keeping on messing things around and changing them. Pick one thing and stick with it! F-spot -> Shotwell, Pidgin -> Empathy, drop GIMP, drop OpenOffice (from CD), Gnome -> Unity, etc.

Re:It's good, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes Evolution has plugins http://projects.gnome.org/evolution/developer-doc/eplugin/ (the documentation is a bit out of date though). They are written in Python if I've correct. Though I think you could write them in another language. I'm not sure, read the docs.

Exchange support

[argonaut]

Is Thunderbird able to work well with Exchange yet?

Re:Exchange support

[andrewd18]

Yes and no. Yes, in that it sends and receives e-mails just fine. No, in that Exchange calendar support (which we use heavily here at my office) is still ridiculously fubar, even with the Lightning addon. [comments based on Thunderbird 3.5 & Lightning about 3 months ago]

Re:Exchange support

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno. Does Evolution work well with Exchange yet? The key phrase being "work well".

Day late and a dollar short...

[geminidomino]

My first thought was to AOL (say "me too!" for all you young'ns) the myriad "Evolution sucks posts" but then I realized... BFD. A distro's next release including a better mail client by default is a good thing, until one considers that said distro has been going out of its way to piss on stability and usability for about 4 releases now (or 6 if you go back to putting in pulseaudio...)

Why foist applications onto people?

[MacTO]

I know the big thing about Ubuntu is that it is ready to go out of the box (so to speak), but people are always complaining about the default programs. And if you changed them to what the complainers wanted, other people would complain about the changes.

So why not give "advanced users" the option to install just the programs they want so that they can add in what they want later without a mess of orphaned packages. They don't even have to be sophisticated about it. Deselecting "Internet Applications" then adding Firefox, Thunderbird, and Pidgin in the Software Centre would be a lot easier than removing Empathy and Evolution then adding Thunderbird and Pidgin. (Never mind tracking down that orphaned package that leaves a dysfunctional Evolution icon hanging around or removing the other network applications that I just don't use.)

It's just an idea. After all, it could be tucked away behind that "advanced" button on the last screen so that the typical user will never be burdened/confused by it.

Re:Why foist applications onto people?

[MrEricSir]

What do you mean by "orphaned packages?"

Re:Why foist applications onto people?

[BitZtream]

They have that option, I think its called *INSERT ANY OTHER DISTRO NAME HERE*

good decision

[Anonymous Coward]

As a long time ubuntu user I always removed evolution manually and installed thunderbird additionally. Thumbs up!

Finally

[motang]

Finally, I use Thunderbird everyday, this is just one more app I don't need to install when I do a fresh install of Ubuntu.

Finally!

[webdoctors]

about time. First thing I did on a new install of Windows/Ubuntu was install Thunderbird. Stupid Evolution, what a piece of crap.

Such awesome news!

[Saint Aardvark]

This was always one of the first changes I made in a new Ubuntu install. Evolution was awful, slow, and I hated it.

Cross platform helps.

[LWATCDR]

I have yet to see a windows version of Evolution. I keep hearing about one but so far I have not seen one. Thunderbird works on Windows and Linux so it is a better choice for people that have to use both systems.

Re:Cross platform helps.

[glwtta]

I have yet to see a windows version of Evolution.

It's been around for a while: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/

Re:Cross platform helps.

[Anonymous Coward]

It exists:
http://evolution-win32.sourceforge.net/

I used it some years ago, in fact. (was a bit buggy)

No backup feature built in.

[Anonymous Coward]

The single thing I loved about Evolution was the backup feature. A nice compressed file that backs up everything. Mail, settings, everything. Thunderbird still doesn't have that option. Sure you can grab a third party program to do it, but it baffles me why they wouldn't include such a feature themselves.

My windows clients (ie the relatives I do tech support for) use thunderbird at my request. Adding a backup feature for thunderbird would make my life so much easier.

Every time I think about switching my own email back to thunderbird this lack of a no-brainer feature makes me wish groin trauma on the thunderbird development team.

Anachronistic much?

[aussersterne]

Apple is working on multiple-device cloud services and bringing the app-supplants-web model to every form factor. Microsoft is working on new mobile platforms and the multitouch desktop.

Meanwhile, Linux continues to be embroiled in the devastatingly interesting GNOME vs. KDE and POP email client wars.

1999 called. They want their story back.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[tuffy]

And Apple has finally introduced downloadable apps to its core OS, like Debian's had since 1999 via apt. But we're still waiting for delta updates to those apps, like Fedora has supported for years via delta RPM.

Plenty of anachronisms to go around.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[emtilt]

Seriously. Linux is still great for many applications, but I think the present is the farthest behind Microsoft's/Apple's products in terms of general appeal as a consumer desktop OS that it has ever been. And this is coming from someone who uses several Linux distros daily and depends on them deeply.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pff! Who cares about detla updates? Until Apple doesn't originally invent it it's a worthless features only geeks would care about. Apple is the only one who can bring me the features I will ever want: Features implemented by Apple.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[Pausanias]

Let's face it: this is about GNOME/KDE, not Linux the kernel. Linux the kernel has won already. It's not the year of "Linux on the Desktop", it's the year of Linux on the Android/Tivo/VirginAmerica/the list goes on...

Linux the kernel is no longer relevant to this discussion. FWIW, Apple's Mach kernel is just as good as Linux. The discussions are about GNOME/KDE vs. Mac OS/iOs vs. Windows.

The backend is just catching up to Debian/yum, but the front end is way ahead. Once there is parity between the Linux backends and the Apple/Windows ones, there will be little reason to switch. Especially given how many of the best free and open source software is available now natively compiled for Windowds and Mac OS. The big game changer was the fact that Windows 7 doesn't suck any more. It's actually usable, if still closed.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[BitZtream]

Really? I can buy debian programs via apt-get? What? No?

There have been software repositories for Windows and Mac for OSS/free software for years, so they weren't included by default, you'd probably be screaming anti-trust if they were.

If you want to get technical, OSX and Windows (since 95 at least) both include web browsers which have access to every publicly available app in existence via a quick google search, which is arguably easier than apt-get . ... fuck, what am I looking for a gain? oh yea, a email client ... okay ... apt-get email-client

How well did that work for you? Oh, thats not what you'd do? You know all the command line search options? Oh ... well grandma doesn't and doesn't give a shit about learning it either, even she has more to live for than you apparently.

While the new 'appstores' are similar to OSS repositories, they are only slightly less similar to calling a web browser and google as software repository. If you were to do so ... well, apt-get has less features.

But ... having that argument shows the point has been missed.

Its not that there is a problem with having different feature lists and focusing on the parts that are important to you ...

The problem is that the focus in the Linux world is on retarded shit no one, not even the Linux community ACTUALLY GIVES A SHIT about.

Its easy to find a Windows or an OSX app, they are popular, easy to search for, not really a massive NEED for the app store unless you want some sort of regulation, which I'm sure you'd refer to as censorship. For Linux however, the more of a newbie you are, the harder it is, unless you have repositories. Do you remember what it was like running Linux without package managers? I do.

You're worried about getting deltas for updates ... NO ONE FUCKING CARES YOU DORK. Thats not a feature anyone gives a shit about save a few fanatical dorks like yourself. You missed the GPs point entirely. Its not 'the OSS guys argue over whats right and wrong' its that 'the OSS guys are arguing about shit we don't give a flying fuck about, while the commercial guys made some pretty GUIs ... and things I can plugin and just work in my car, and on my PC at work, and blah blah blah', the list is endless.

Someone says 'Linux is clunky' and you respond 'you don't know how to use it'. Someone says 'OSX makes it hard to do this', Apple says 'hmmm, well, what you really want to do is this, and here, we'll make that easier for you!' and you say 'we've had that in Linux for years!' ... except you really had some other half assed implementation of something that sorta worked like it (example: sudo versus UAC) ...

and Linux fanatics who sit around and argue over stupid shit ... like why apt doesn't do deltas, or why KDE bends over to Gnome or vice versa finally ending up with someone making the statement 'If they do XXX with Ubuntu, it'll be the year of the Linux desktop'.

Rather than making a snide 'YOU DO IT TOO!' comment maybe you should take moment to analyze the situation and contemplate exactly why the statement was made and if there is something meaningful you can gather from it rather than just being an arrogant prick and writing it off as someone insulting your child.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[tuffy]

Hop into Apple's Mac OS App Store and head over to "Categories" -> "Developer Tools" -> "Xcode" and read the reviews for yourself. Minor updates currently require re-downloading the whole 4GB+ application, and people really do care. That's why Apple promised delta updates in the future.

The point is that Linux is still trailing Mac OS in some respects, while Mac OS is still catching up to Linux in others. There's no need to get so offended at such a simple observation.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW app store and iOS updates are going to become deltas soon. Apple announced this at the last WWDC.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[Culture20]

Pff! Who cares about detla updates?

I do. Why do I have to download 60MB at home every time for my iTunes updates? Or worse yet, 200+MB for iPhone updates?

Re:Anachronistic much?

[Anonymous Coward]

The PC isn't dying nor will it. The cloud will never satisfy those who want to own and control their own data. Gmail webmail and Apple cloud music might satisfy the tastes of the +/-1 stddev digital corporate consumer, but we're discussing Linux here. The average Linux user understands the pitfalls of handing over their data and privacy to a cloudy infrastructure run by an aggressive marketing behemoth. Many don't care, but their understanding puts them light years ahead of the userbase happily abandoning their POP clients to assimilate to the Borg.

The dedicated POP client user doesn't care if Google can push his social 2.0 AJAX enhanced cloud webmail to his IPv6 bluetooth always on smart broadband vacuum cleaner.

Me? Enigmail is a killer extension. It has no substitute in the web/cloud/neologism nor will it ever. Cloud services and marketing funded cruft are build on the assumption that providers must have no less access to your data as you do. That is fundamentally incompatible with any sane privacy or security model.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[Anonymous Coward]

just wait til you see gnome 3!!! its superb.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[joshbosh]

The backend is just catching up to Debian/yum, but the front end is way ahead.

The interfaces for Windows and OS X may be way ahead for people who point-and-click, but for people such as myself, whose fingers rarely leave the home row, window managers such as awesome and xmonad are way ahead of anything produced by Microsoft and Apple.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Debian has had debdelta for years, probably for longer than Fedora's deltarpm stuff.

Re:Anachronistic much?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu is working full speed on the new mobile platforms and the multitouch desktop; it's called Unity.

Sadly, Canonical's 'full speed' may not be enough, but anyway...

Setup Wizard

[Anonymous Coward]

And they STILL haven't fixed the setup wizard. I've said the same thing with every release since thunderbird 3: the setup process needs a way to completely BYPASS the wizard, BEFORE the wizard starts spinning out of control. Not after, not during, but BEFORE.

It's not rocket science. The very first thing you do, before committing any changes, is prompt the user: "Would you like to use the account setup wizard, or would you like to setup your account manually?" For christ's sake, it's going to take all of 5 minutes to implement this.

I don't need or want an "improved" wizard. I need a way to bypass it, cleanly and without a trace. (And I say "without a trace" because even if you manage to stop the wizard, the first server address it pulls out of its ass, however wrong it may be, will be the chosen name of your new account and account folder.) The only thing worse than making assumptions about how the user intends to use the program is forcing the user to follow those assumptions. PLEASE, don't do it.

Software relearning?

[Isaac Remuant]

Funny, that's what my dad said when I told him about Windows 7. He wants to stick with what he knows (IE 7/8), Excel 03 (even if he doesn't use 0.003 % of it's features and could easily switch to OpenOffice.

I don't think is so much about the OS and software changes but about people. If you teach your dad how to get his software of choice he should be able to have Ubuntu exactly as he wants.

I understand what you mean though. Considering the target market of Ubuntu, most of those users won't go much further than the default software bundle.

Finally...

[frisket]

About time too. Evolution is huge and slow and cumbersome, and insists on loading every folder and subfolder in your IMAP config every time you open it and log in, instead of doing it on demand.

Thunderbird quite painful

[murdocj]

When I switched computers a few years ago I had to change email clients and switched to Thunderbird. Configuration was excruciating. Mercifully I've blocked out the details but one thing I remember is that Thunderbird WOULD NOT let me just enter the configuration... I could enter the server and then it had to guess at what the rest of the parameters were, and I had to stop the process at the right moment, or else I was screwed. I spent a ton of time crawling thru the settings and there didn't seem to be any way to just enter what I wanted.

I built a new machine last year and spent about half an hour screwing around with Thunderbird and then gave up and installed MS LiveMail (or whatever it's called... the equivalent of Outlook Express). Entered the configuration, connected, done, in a minute or so.

Re:Thunderbird quite painful

[belg4mit]

Configuration became trivial for most servers in Thunderbird 3,
where it gussed or tried various parameters automatically.

Re:Thunderbird quite painful

[murdocj]

The "guessing & trying" WAS the problem. And it wasn't just me who ran into the problem, I've seen posts from others complaining about the same issue.

When I tried to configure Thunderbird I could see it guessing at POP & SMTP server names that were clearly wrong, and when it had finished, there was no way for me to enter the correct names. As I recall, I had to interrupt the process as the right moment and then it was possible to enter server configuration, but if I let it complete, I was screwed. It would have been much easier to just edit a text configuration file by hand.

Re:Thunderbird quite painful

[rgviza]

Wow... it takes me all of 5 minutes to get work, gmail and msn connected in thunderbird. Are you sure we are talking about the same email client?

Outlook/Outlook express is a nightmare unless you are just hooking it up to exchange and hotmail. Of course it's really simple in Thunderbird too.

Then again I've used it since thunderbird 3 and understand how various email protocols work. Maybe that's your issue...

Re:Thunderbird quite painful

[murdocj]

Well, if you want to compare experience, I was configuring email back in the 80's using Eudora and have implemented TCP/IP applications at the socket level, so I don't think I'm hindered by a lack of understanding. In fact, configuring a POP server is so trivial that pretty much anyone can do it, IF they are given the chance.

Re:Thunderbird quite painful

[belg4mit]

You did not have to stop the process, but that was one way.
You could also have let it run to completion/failure, and then
entered your settings.

Re:Thunderbird quite painful

[OFnow]

Sorry you had trouble, but yes you can easily go back and fix whatever got wrong by looking at the accounts data with the panels and windows that Thunderbird provides. For some data you have to notice the 'advanced' button on Account Settings->ServerSettings (which seems a misfeature making it just a bit harder to find than it should be). Had no trouble getting Thunderbird to interface with outlook (whatever the MS server is called) (but it took an outlook expert to know how MS expected things to be set). On the other hand the OWA web interface to MS's email was truly horrible, I refused to use it. Maddening. (at least with Firefox on Linux). Actually I've used two slighly different versions of the OWA junk and both were horrible. As was Evolution (to be on-topic here).

Used to like thunderbird ..

[artg]

But the incarnation in current Debian (icedove 3, whatever that corresponds to) sucks. It was once fairly well-behaved, but now changes the screen format when you search, adds all sorts of stupid indentation and grouping to the accounts menu and generally behaves like a kid's been let loose with the feature list. Maybe it's time to go back to MH.

This decision is NOT final

[jginspace]

Evolution has not been 'booted' (word used in TFA), the decision on going ahead with Thunderbird or Evolution will be made before the release of alpha 3 in a few weeks. See the blueprint. I knew there was a reason why I stopped reading Extremetech.

Re:Pidgin

[jginspace]

absolutely. I also agree with the commenter below, get rid of empathy and go back to pidgin, and then we'll be a step closer to ubuntu not being crap.

It might well happen.I think the main driver was the integration with Gnome and Ubuntu deferred to the Gnome guys. With Ubuntu moving away from Gnome lately we could see a reverse.

Trouble is, neither Pidgin nor Empathy have progressed very much since Ubuntu put together this comparison:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EmpathyVsPidginUsability

Thank God.

[Anonymous Coward]

Its about time.

Peeve

[evilad]

I'll consider it fit as soon as I an drag an attachment to the desktop. It's been a bug for four years and counting now.

It's About Time

[skavoovie5]

It's about time a distro admitted what a horrible MUA and application evolution is. Thunderbird is infinitely better, and I hope Fedora will make the same transition. Thunderbird + Lightening for calendaring FTW.

Re:It's About Time

[allo]

every email client sucks.

Exchange connectivity

[Smigh]

The thing that Evolution had that played a big part for us in adopting Evolution, was that it had really easy MS Exchange connectivity. I don't know if this was a factor in Cannonical's decision in the past but it was for me.

"fit for adoption in Ubuntu"

[Anonymous Coward]

"fit for adoption in Ubuntu"?

I have been using Thunderbird long before Ubuntu existed.

Evolution was never fit for adoption by any distribution. Co-workers always complained about Evolution crashes.

I wondered why they used Evolution, but many just use the default.

Thunderbird has always been in Ubuntu, but I guess not the default.

Golden Age?

[sourcerror]

" Linux is still great for many applications, but I think the present is the farthest behind Microsoft's/Apple's products in terms of general appeal as a consumer desktop OS that it has ever been"

When was that golden age? Did I miss the year of Linux on the desktop?

I think Ubuntu improved usability quite well, although I miss ctrl-alt-del (task manager). It can be useful for fullscreen applications, like games. On Linux I have to go to alt-ctrl-1 (80*25 terminal) and then kill the process by PID, to shut down a freezing program, because a freezing program captures the keyboard binding for xkill.

Also I think that the default Nautilus without Location Bar is quite annoying. (I like to copy-paste directory paths.) Also, why does it have to be ctrl+L, when in all browsers you get the url bar with alt+D (firefox, opera, ie, safari).

In general, I think Linux folks could have learnt a lot for Windows UI design (yeah I know, that's heresy). It would be also nice to have an option to make keyboard shortcuts similar to Windows. That would be also a great help for newcomers. ( I'm not a newcomer, but I still think Windows got the UI thing implemented better.)

Re:Golden Age?

[emtilt]

I didn't mean to imply that there was a "year of Linux on the Desktop," just that the gap between desktop usability is growing. I won't reiterate what all the other replies to parent said, but they're spot on. The Linux kernel has succeeded, but the desktop managers and common distros are needlessly cumbersome for everyday computer use. If you did an experiment where you got average people to try Ubuntu, Windows 7, and OS/X for everyday computer use, I bet you'd be very hardpressed to find someone that prefered Ubuntu.

Easy Evolution-Thunderbird Address Book conversion

[Anonymous Coward]

For anyone who wants to migrate from Evolution to Thunderbird, I found a REALLY EASY way to convert the contacts/address book info. In Evolution Contacts, select File-->Save Address Book as vCard. Then use this website to convert from .vcf to .ldif: http://labs.brotherli.ch/vcfconvert/
Once you have the .ldif file, you can import into Thunderbird Address Book, and every single bloody detail comes over (at least it did for me).

You can also copy the php script from that webpage, for future use, if needed (if that website is ever taken down).

Actually in the early '90s

[aussersterne]

when Linux was being downloaded as 100 floppy images from shareware boards, the Linux desktop was light years ahead of anything else available outside of a university engineering lab.

I had a 16-bit color desktop running X and Windows and Mac users would go green with envy at the speed, stability and features. Integrated networking that just worked across the entire OS, not relying on clunky shareware applications or hacks that were limited to one or two contexts or online features. Dozens of windows open with no issues and no crashing. Large SCSI-based filesystems that were lighting fast thanks to the memory management model. The ability to interact with the GUI via the command line and vice-versa. Running applications on the root window, watching them refresh behind windows in the foreground. Even regular applications (forget about scientific computing and large-scale data stuff that used to be the UNIX bread and butter) were impressive to people. Emacs. Andrew. Xfig. Wingz. Mosaic.

To show off a Linux desktop in the early '90s was to show people what computers "were really capable of."

There was still some ground to stand on when advocating for Linux until the mid '00s, but things have really become stale in the world of Linux, apart from the kernel as another poster (rightly) points out. Desktop Linux now looks like the geeks at Star Wars conventions—a bunch of people really enthusiastic about a particular moment in (in this case computing) history that nobody else really cares about any longer.

Re:Actually in the early '90s

[sourcerror]

I wasn't using Linux back then, but since 2005 every year I tried a Linux distro, just to see what they do know. In 2008 I got a job where every developer was using Linux (Ubuntu or Kubuntu), and as I heard from others most Java programming gigs happen use Linux or Solaris as a server.
I have a dual boot machine and I'm using mostly Ubuntu for a while, as it's just faster than Windows (I installed a lot of software, mostly from sourceforge, and even though I uninstalled a few stuff that I don't really need, it's still too slow; if I installed the same amount stuff on Ubuntu and it didn't slow down a bit).
Software licensing here in Eastern-Europe is a big expense, and BSA is cracking down on corporate pirates, so there's a lot of intrest in oss software, even from the government side. I saw small businesses save money on using Thunderbird and Openoffice (though they run it on Windows).
The more quality multi-platform oss application we have, the transition gets the easier. What has once become opensource remains that forever, so it's much easier to build on the work of others than in the proprietary world. Oss software doesn't need yearly update tax; fixes, new features come for free, and if you don't like it you can always go back to some earlier version.
So I don't think the future is so bleak.

I actually liked Evolution...

[Seyedkevin]

Evolution had all the features I wanted and none of the features I didn't care for. I'm not saying it's perfect but after spending hours trying to get Thunderbird to do what I wanted, I realized it was just too painful to use Thunderbird.

If for example, you wanted PGP support, good message threading support, force plaintext if available, Google Contacts + Calendar sync, script generated signatures, ActiveSync support, mbox spool support, maildir support, and what have you, this is all integrated into Evolution by default. A lot of the addons on Thunderbird that accomplishes these things feel really subpar. I recall at one point accidentally deleting all my contacts on Google via an add-on for Thunderbird. Thankfully, I had my contacts backed up, so I didn't suffer too much from that.

That being said, if all you want, like the majority of people, is a simple mail client that you can use to read mail from, Thunderbird is much leaner and probably better. I feel Evolution more suitable in an enterprise environment due to Activesync support and due to its similarities to Outlook. Since Ubuntu's becoming more and more of a personal desktop OS rather than an enterprise OS like what Red Hat offers, I would say their strategy to adopt Thunderbird was a good one.

Additionally, Evolution used to be a lot slower than it is now. It was practically unusable if you had a high volume inbox. The older version of Evolution is used for the Windows version wchich you can get here: http://www.dipconsultants.com/evolution/, making it easily inferior in the face of Thunderbird on Windows.

maildir support

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea, like where is it?

chromium, thunderbird, etc.

[allo]

did they code some transition? the typical ubuntu-users needs a wizard or something like this to migrate his data.

They actually care about fixing crashes

[Anonymous Coward]

For those using the Calendar extension

How to connect to Exchange (use DavMail proxy)

[lotzmana]

For everybody operating in a corporate environment mail, calendar and address book are delivered by an Exchange server. Thunderbird is good for pop3/imap/ldap which are all open standards but Exchange doesn't talk these protocols.

Enter DavMail -- a proxy that connects to Exchange server on one hand and exports pop3/imap/ldap on the other. I have been successfully using it for the past 3-4 years.

(bashrc.sourceforge.net -- configuration tricks for bashrc)

Laughably bad UI

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate the massive (and completely unnecessary and unwarranted) dependency trainwreck of evolution as much as anyone, but as far as *actually being an email app* goes, even evolution isn't as bad as the 3.0+ versions of TB.

9 lines for headers?! MINIMUM?! When 3 of those entries (which take 6 lines since they're double-spaced, jesus christ) are visible in the index 2cm away in the first place.
So a one line status bar on a browser is too evil to support, but burning close to 1/3 of the window height on headers that have absolutely no value and can't be disabled makes sense? And let's piss away even more vertical real estate on a tab bar, because Tabs Are The New Black; and even more putting a Reply button in that header space too, because it's not like there's literally a thousand pixels of empty space in the main button bar...

it's not just that almost every ui decision mozilla's made in the last 2 or 3 years has been completely moronic, it's that they can't even be wrong in the same way on different apps. it's like some bizarro world: if a ui element is hugely important, remove it entirely and don't even leave in an option; but if it's completely meaningless, force it on the user and make sure there's no option to NOT have it.

i'm sure TB can't be as buggy as evolution, or as bloated (though i have faith they'll manage that eventually), but the ui is an absolute joke, and not actually being able to READ an email that's more than 5 lines long or to see more than 1/4 of even just a 640x480 image attachment makes it absolutely useless as an email client.

gmail is the most popular linux mail client.

[Anonymous Coward]

Right now gmail is the most popular mail client on the linux platform. It just has a better user interface. Here is some advice for future linux mail clients
* Focus on conversations rather than single mails
* Use tags rather than folders
* Make it easy to search throgh mail