[Evolution] Sorely disenchanted with Evolution (looong)

[Frank Gore <fgore sympatico ca>]

Over the past few months, I've slowly come to the realization that maybe
Evolution isn't the ideal tool for my purposes. Perhaps someone here can
convince me otherwise by pointing out what I'm doing wrong. 

When I first looked at the features for Evolution, I thought this single
email and calendaring application would be the first to satisfy all my
needs. But as time went on, I found some frustrating issues that
prevented me from improving my productivity. In fact, I find myself
angrily frustrated most of the time. 

First the good things: I've NEVER had any stability problems with
Evolution, and for this I'm grateful. I've never come across any of the
issues described by others on this mailing list, despite (or because
of?) the fact that I run Evolution with Window Maker in Slackware 8.x
and have never touched Red Carpet or RPM packages (unsupported distro,
unsupported DE, unsupported Slackware package format). Even Evolution
1.0.7 has been super-reliable for stability, so kudos to that! 

The VFolders feature is totally awesome. It allows me to view only
orders for specific products without having to sort them all into a
seperate real folder, and this is a huge bonus. I wish I could find a
similar feature on another client.

But this is where the awesomeness ends and the problems begin. I've
never been able to compile the CVS version of Evolution, and perhaps all
those features I really need are only available there right now. 

I receive an average of 550 emails per day. Many of these are email
summaries and receipts of orders placed through the online store I work
for. The rest are either customer emails asking for tech support or
customer service, or private emails. This is all done over 3 seperate
accounts. I need to be able to cross-reference all of the emails to do
my job quickly and efficiently. I also need to be able to manage my
tasks quickly and efficiently. I have a terrible memory, and it's very
hard to keep up with all the items that come up everyday, so a good task
management/calendar app is essential. And the vast majority of my tasks
happen on the web (store backends), so I need to be able to take
information from my emails and into the browser without having to type
everything in manually. 

For years now I've been looking for the ideal environment to get all
this done efficiently. Everytime I try something new, I always find
myself wandering back to Mozilla, which is unfortunate... kinda like
settling for the lesser evil.

No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to ever be able to copy and paste
things out of displayed emails in evolution (what some people call the
"preview pane"). I've tried everything I could think of, but it never
works. Shift-Delete, Ctrl-C, even Edit/Copy from the menu. None of it
ever manages to copy anything. The only way I can ever get it to copy or
cut text is if I hit Reply and copy the text out of the email editor.
This is a HUGE drawback when I'm doing order tracking and need to
quickly copy UPS tracking numbers into a spreadsheet or the browser.
There's no way I'm gonna type hundreds of tracking numbers by hand
everyday. And having to hit Reply to every email before I can copy text
out of it is a pain. This has plagued me ever since the first 1.0
release of Evolution. What am I doing wrong? Am I the only one with this
problem?

Another issue is the fact that I can't get the cc and Reply-to to
auto-fill with default values. I need this for almost every email I send
out. Remembering to do it manually for each and every email is not only
a chore, it's error-prone. I find myself forgetting too often. I've
brought this up before and was told the CVS version had this feature,
but as I mentioned above, I never got the CVS version to compile.

Along those same lines, I can never get Evolution to send from the right
account. Once email has been received and filtered, it no longer seems
to belong to any specific account, despite the fact that it's stored in
seperate mail files on the hard drive. So when I reply to it, it's
anyone's guess as to which account it'll be sent from. If my email
address was in the To: of the original email, then it "usually" gets
sent from that account, but that's not nearly good enough. Most of the
email I receive isn't addressed to me, it's addressed to the company's
customer service address. I can't be replying to customers using my
personal account, nor do I want to be doing my private emailing from my
corporate account. I realize that changing the From: account is a simple
task, but I find myself forgetting to do it regularly and that's when
trouble begins.

Ideally, the cc: and Reply-to: should auto-fill differently based on
which account the email is being sent from. Now THAT would be awesome.

This and a few other issues have rendered Evolution unuseable for my
corporate emailing. Not because of any major design flaws or bugs, but
because Mozilla mail does most of these things properly. There's simply
no reason to have to put up with these issues if I can find those
features elsewhere. I've brought most of this up before, hoping that
someone might be able to help me fix the problems. But at this point I'm
at my wit's end. No matter how hard I try, Evolution just doesn't do
what I need it to. This is really unfortunate because the calendar/task
scheduling part of Evolution is exactly what I've been looking for to
manage my tasks and appointments. But it seems like a waste to run
Evolution just for the calendar.

Here's hoping that all these issues will disapear and Evolution becomes
the ultimate emailing and scheduling suite! In the meantime, can someone
please recomend an email and scheduling app that might fit my needs? I
don't care if they're two seperate programs, as long as they work well
and allow me to be more productive. Mozilla (even 1.0) is still too
unstable and often crashes or locks up on me, or has other erratic
behaviour. It's also too slow on my archaic Celeron 600. And the beta
calendar app for Mozilla refuses to run on my computer.

Thanks,
Frank Gore