Re: [Evolution] User impressions about Evolution

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Fri, 2003-10-17 at 04:47, Roberto Rosselli Del Turco wrote:
> 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?

yes. you're complaining about 60 megabytes? that's nothing. the more
mail you have, the more memory evolution uses. we do as much as we
reasonably can to keep memory usage down such as using string pools,
memory chunks, shared ref-counted objects, etc. If you know of a way to
make it use less memory, feel free to tell us about this new trick :-)

>  and/or with the fact that I
> use spamassassin to check incoming mails?

shouldn't be.

> 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?

because the bonobo menu items don't allow it. only gtk menus allow it,
and that was considered a bug. I don't think gtk2.0 allows this anymore.
(Nope, it doesn't. Just checked :-)

>  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.

just use , and . - only 1 key.

> 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).

this has been discussed and found to be counter-intuitive. space should
scroll the message, but NOT jump to the next message. that behaviour
would be extremely annoying to a lot of users (including myself, who
*hates* that feature of mutt).

> 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.

huh? we thread according to in-reply-to and references headers. we don't
thread based on date. this makes no sense.

>  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?

huh? no. likely a bug in the other clients you communicate with if
anything. they probably aren't properly setting the threading headers.

> 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.

*shrug* might be a good idea. no one has ever suggested this before
afaik, perhaps submit it as a feature request for the GAL::ETree widget.

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

Edit->Select Thread
Edit->Mark As Read

it'd be silly to have a Mark All Messages In Thread As Read menu (not to
mention how long the label is...)

> 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.

each component will have its own folder tree in 2.0

> 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.

there are probably bugs in bugzilla about this. if not, probably add
them (preferably with sample files etc)

> 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?

because it still has some tools that are useful even in plain text
formatting.

> 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?

select the folder as an offline folder and evo will sync it to a local
cache.

Jeff

-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc.
fejj ximian com  - www.ximian.com