[Evolution] Usability

["Lonnie J. Borntreger" <email borntreger com>]

I have a couple of usability related feature requests.

1 - Preview Pane.  Although I like the UI and PIM capabilities of Outlook a
lot, they are not my favorite features.  The best feature is one that is
ONLY implemented in Outlook: the ability to turn off the preview pane and
NOT automatically download and view selected emails.  Since I don't trust
some unknown emails (that are obviously spam), and I don't always want to
download large emails, this feature allows me to do a quick "manual"
filtering of email received without the overhead of always downloading,
viewing and having it marked as read.  This would be a great improvement if
added to Evolution.

2 - Fonts.  This is probably NOT specifically an Evolution since I seem to
see the same issue in all gnome applications: the almost complete lack of
font support.  I mean specifically the ability to change the font in more
ways than selecting "normal, heading, etc.".  I would like to be able to
specify a font family for a word or paragraph.  I'm guessing this is a
gtkhtml limitation??

3 - Signature.  Even though Evolution always looks for a file with a html
suffix when pulling in the sig file, it pulls it in as raw text, showing the
html tags rather than using them.

FYI:
Bug or incomplete feature: I sent a meeting request from my Outlook
(Internet mode) at work to my Evolution at home.  Evolution correctly
recognized the request, allowed me to accept the meeting, but the reply
ended up back at my Outlook email as having a text attachment, not a
calendar attachment.

I also need help unrelated directly to Evolution.  I'm running the Mandrake
Cooker distribution of Linux.  Recently, I updated autoconf.  Since then I
can no longer configure and compile Evolution (I've been updated from CVS
daily until this issue).  It seems that autoheader is complaining about
issues with 'divert' syntax in the xml-i18n-tools.m4 file, and placing the
complaints into the /tmp/*/traces.sh file which then is invalid shell and
can't be executed.  I looked at the CVS version of that m4 file, and it
looks exactly like what I have.  Has anyone seen this problem?  Is there any
fix other than to go back to an older version of autoconf.

Keep up the great work,
Lonnie Borntreger