[Evolution] User impressions about Evolution

[Roberto Rosselli Del Turco <rosselli ling unipi it>]

Hi all,
I have been playing with Evolution almost since the beginnings, but it's
only recently that I have switched from Mozilla Messenger to Evo on my
main Linux box (Evolution 1.4.4 on Mandrake Linux 9.2). Of course it was
only after I started using Evo day after day with a relatively big
message base (about 15-20.000 messages) that I started noticing things.
Here are my thoughts, mainly about things IMHO could work better; note
that I didn't read all of the FAQ, so if something is nicely explained
there just pass me the usual RTFM line ;)

1. I noticed that Evo is fast, really faster than MM on my 2200 Athlon
box; memory usage, OTOH, is much higher than I expected/remembered: is
it normal to reach 60Mb? why does it seem to increase with time?
Fortunately I have plenty of memory, but it was a mild shock noticing
that Evo starts a session with about 31-2 megs (in itself much more than
I remembered) and it might end up with almost 60 MB: is this related to
the amount of mails stored in the database? and/or with the fact that I
use spamassassin to check incoming mails?

2. The UI is OK, or I'm getting used to it (waiting for Evo 2.0), but
there are some quirks: why can't I change accelerators/shortcuts as with
other GNOME apps? f.i. I just had the habit to press N to go to the next
unread message, with Evo it's a rather unintuitive ], and I have to
press two keys; so I'd like to change the shortcut, but it seems to be
impossible.

3. Again on the subject of moving to the next unread message, using the
space bar should do just that (or at least move to the next message);
and when there aren't unread messages left, it would be nice to move to
the next folder (MM asks you if you want to do that, actually).

4. Threads aren't displayed very well: messages that should belong to
the same thread are dispersed according to their date in many different
threads. This is quite annoying and, in some ways, unpredictable (i.e.
in certain folders threads behave better than in others), is this a
problem specific to the last Evo releases?

5. Another (minor) issue with threads: the grey/white line coloring is
great when order messages without threading, but is slightly confusing
when you use threads; it would be nice to differentiate between
differents threads alternating white for *all* messages that belong to a
thread, grey for all those that belong to the next one, and so on. Don't
know if the text widget allows this.

6. One last note about threads (I promise :) : add a "Mark all as read
in thread" command, would be a real time saver.

7. I have lots of folders and, as a consequence, lots of folder icons in
the folder bar: "special" (in the sense of "not a folder") icons like
Contacts, Calendar are scarcely visible among all other folder icons; as
the shortcut bar won't be there in Evo 2.0, take this into consideration
when deciding how and where to draw those special icons.

8. Import routines have their own quirks, for instance I had to import
manually all of my Mozilla folders because only Pine (?) was listed in
the "general" import dialog; and when importing Mozilla addressbooks, I
had to specify the format once or twice, because it wasn't recognized
automatically.

9. Why is a HTML commands tool bar present in the mail composing window
even if I chose to not compose mails in HTML format?

10. IMAP mail seems to have some problems (with this versions), but
others have already mentioned them on the list, so I won't go there
again; is there a way to have Evo automatically download all of the
messages available on the remote folder?

That's it for now, keep up the good work!

Ciao

-- 
 
Roberto Rosselli Del Turco      roberto.rossellidelturco at unito.it
Dipartimento di Scienze         rosselli at ling.unipi.it
del Linguaggio                  Then spoke the thunder  DA
Universita' di Torino           Datta: what have we given?  (TSE)
 
  Hige sceal the heardra,     heorte the cenre,
  mod sceal the mare,       the ure maegen litlath.  (Maldon 312-3)