[Evolution] migrating from PINE

[dpeterso ne orst edu]

Hello,

First, some background and praise:
I have only played with Evolution a couple of times to see what the fuss
is about and admit I'm intrigued.  I'm also very impressed with the speed
and quality of development.  0.10 was essentially unusable on my box, but
0.12 seems to be rather stable and usable.  I like the idea of the
VFolders for the searching etc.

Now the "issues":
PINE is my primary mail client.  It just does so many things so well...and
I can't seem to find a reasonable compromise/functionality in evolution
though surely it must exist if I'm only told where to look.

1) Is there any way to incorporate/import PINE's .addressbook?  I really
don't want to go through the hassle of entering some 100 new contacts by hand.

2) Is there a compose functionality akin to PINE's lists?  That is, can I
have a single recipient (Contact in Evo-speak?) represent a dozen email
addresses?

3) Can I get Evo to:
        a) read my existing pine saved mail folders
        b) write to those existing folders
Note that the "import" of PINE folders has never worked reliably for me.
The last time I tried that, it A) put every message from every PINE folder
into  the local inbox of Evo: B) created a mailbox folder heirchy that was
my $HOME directory tree.  Not fun ;-)  Now, I have just discovered, that
if I FIRST create an empty evolution folder (no small feat in itself, to
get it to go to the Right Place) and try importing a single mbox to that
newly-created folder, it seems to work.  Sort-of (more later).  But, this
borders on the sublimely ridiculous because I now have two copies of each
piece of mail:  one in the evolution tree and one in the mail tree.  And
if I save a message from one client, the other doesn't know about it.  I
would like to share the same file.  Maybe this isn't possible?  However,
even this is a painful task because I really don't want to manually,
1-by-1 create new Evo folders to mimic my 50 or so PINE folders, much less
manually import that mail step-by-step.  There must(?!) be an easier way
that I'm missing.

Now, an annoying (I think bug, but am not sure) behavior is that anytime I
operate on any Evolution folder (or about every 2 minutes when the program
checks for new mail) I get an error popup: "Error while synchronizing
folder: /home/donald/evolution/path/to/some/mailfolder//mbox:  Too many
open files."  As best as I can tell, this does not affect the operation of
Evolution, but none-the-less still appears on a regular basis.

I really look forward to the import of GnomeCal calendar information as
well.

(Almost finally), an honest effort should be made to include documentation
with the rpms.  This program is really difficult to figure out without
documentation.  (Well, maybe if one has come from an Outlook background,
it's not so bad?  I wouldn't know.)  Coming from a command-line
background of VMS and UNIX, with standard mail and PINE, it's not
straight-forward, and the biggest hurdle I had was figuring out the menu
structure and how things work.  I still don't have a good understanding of
how filtering works under Evo...

Finally, should I try entering these behavior as bugs or
wishes on bugzilla?  How?

Thanks for listening, and keep up the good work.  It does look like a very
promising tool---esp. for those coming from Outlook etc.

Cheers,
-Don
_________________________________________________
Donald A. Peterson       | dpeterso engr orst edu
Ph.D. Research Associate |
Dept. of Chemistry       | PH:  (541) 737-7079
Oregon St. University    | FAX: (541) 737-0480
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