Re: [Evolution] Advice

[Dan Winship <danw ximian com>]

> If Evolution had a fast, reliable, 3rd-party-accessible and a
> non-proprietary store, a surprising number of corporations would be
> very interested.

Yes and no. Evolution doesn't have a single store like Outlook. Mail
is stored in standard mboxes or maildirs or MH-style directories (plus
separate summary and text index files). Contact, Calendar and To-do
items are stored in Berkeley db files.

However, the contents of the contact and calendar dbs are
CORBA-accessible through the "Wombat", and all of the components have
pluggable back-ends, so people can implement their own stores, if they
really feel it's important to put their mail in an SQL server or
whatever. (The gnome-db team actually talked about doing this at one
point, although I think we scared them off with promises of
upcoming incompatible API changes at that point in time.)

It's considered a bug that mail isn't CORBA-accessible, but it's not
going to be fixed by 1.0.

> 1. make reminders good, not dumb like Outlook's reminders. a HUGELY 
> requested reminder feature is to have reminders fire when Outlook is not 
> running.

This has always been planned. I think it might start working in 0.9.
(But I might be confusing it with some other feature...)

> 2. Outlook Bar is good for novice users, Folder List is good for power 
> users. But neither is good for most users. Do something good there.

Oh? What's not good about the folder tree?

> 3. Outlook is getting better at syncing from the server for laptop 
> users, but it still sucks. Easy & transparent offline use is a VERY 
> important feature to users!

Also a planned 1.0 feature. There will be very very bad initial
support for disconnected IMAP in 0.9.

> 5. Client & server-side rules are BIG! This should be really easy to 
> configure and if they can work on the server (e.g., edit Procmail rules 
> from the client), even better.

There's a set of internet drafts called Sieve for setting filtering
rules on your IMAP server. Cyrus IMAPd supports it. (I think there's
pretty much no chance of us support it before 1.0 though.)

> 6. Solve Outlook's brain-dead virus attachment "feature". :)

Not ever running scripts that are attached to mail is easy. The real
problem for Outlook these days seems to be that VBA scripts could be
lurking anywhere. We don't have that problem because no GNOME apps
have documents with macro/scripting languages that can affect things
outside of the document itself. But there's still the possibility of
buffer overruns, etc...

> People inside MS hate to use it too.

Ha ha. See, Miguel! It sucks! :-)

> what UI features of Outlook didn't work well at all versus which
> ones were very good

Given how much of Outlook's UI Evolution has cloned, I'd like to hear
about this. (Have you used Evolution yet at all?)

> what people want to do with Outlook

At this point, I think we're busy enough with "what people want to do
with Evolution". :-) Although of course, we'd like to here this too.

Feel free to just send random thoughts to the evolution list whenever
you feel like it. :)

-- Dan