Re: [Evolution] Evo usable as daily/regular mail app?

[Fernando Pereira <fpereira flipdog com>]

On 01 Feb 2001 15:05:26 -0800, Chris Bailey wrote:
> So, what do people think?  My setup would be using POP, and I'd want to 
> make decent use of filters, multiple mail folders (and nested folders), 
> be able to read (and sometimes write) HTML mail, and have it be pretty 
> quick, even with hundres or thousands of emails in the various folders.

I've been using Evo as my primary mail client for several weeks. But
then I like to live dangerously ;-). I have 100M of accumulated saved
mail from previous Unix, MacOS and Windows setups, which I managed to
convert to Evo with the help of scripts that have been published here
(with some changes to match my needs). 

Things that work well (for me): accessing saved mail, including search;
filters; attachments (but see below), folder navigation.

Things that work less well in the 1/30 snapshot: sendmail (as opposed to
SMTP) mail delivery broken for long messages; viewing certain HTML
messages with attachments; general fragility of message composer
(gtkhtml editing problems).

> Is it reasonable to use the CVS version for daily use, or are the 
> snapshots more stable?  I'm fine with building it from CVS.  If people 
> do think it's good to use, what precautions should I take?  e.g. cron 
> job to do a backup of the evolution folder on a nightly basis (or 
> more?).  How about the vfolder stuff, is that pretty stable now?

I'm not using vfolders yet. My two precautions:

1. Frequent backup of folder hierarchy (rsync or unison)
2. procmail cloning of raw incoming mail stream to a backup in case mail
retrieval loses messages (this happened a few snapshots ago).

> I know this could raise some real debate, etc., and that the list is 
> likely biased towards the positive side.  But, I really just want to get 
> people's general feeling (and hopefully it's a "yes - use it").


Since last May, I went through:


    1. Emacs VM: bad problems with non-ASCII character sets,
    attachments; very slow;
    inconvenient filtering; limited ans slow search
    2. Balsa: stability issues; no filters; no search
    3. Mahogany: a lot of progress on this one recently, but various
    stability issues,
    inconvenient search, some mail retrieval problems (eg. message
    duplication, filters  don't always run).


Before this, I had used Eudora on MacOS for five years, and on Windows
for a few months. Eudora is way ahead of any current Linux mail client
that I know of, but then it is a really mature, very stable product.
Overall, Evolution is the current Linux offering I know of that is
moving fastest towards the Eudora ideal, but there is still a ways to
go, especially with respect to stability.

-- F