[Evolution] Somewhat tongue-in-cheek ...

[Tony Earnshaw <tonye billy demon nl>]

... my apologies that I don't have any special difficulties or
complaints with Evo 1.4.5 and my Gnome 2.2.

During the weekend I had to try to emulate what I do with Evo, with
Mozilla Messenger 1.4.1/1.5, SquirrelMail 1.4.2, Opera 7.3, and Kmail
1.5.3.

It was a really horrible weekend, and I'm glad to be back with my Evo.

The underlying infrastructure is Postfix 2.0.18 snapshot, Courier IMAP
2.2.2/maildrop 1.6.3 and Openldap 2.2.5 (the latter is not yet ripe for
production - use 2.1.25/26 with double-patched BDB 4.2.52 for that).

The reason for the emulation-attempt was for documentation that has to
be written for "people" at a renowned Dutch high school, who are now to
get e-mail. They should get as great freedom as possible to use e-mail
from anywhere in the world, whilst at the same time being bound hand and
foot as far as spamming and otherwise cheating are concerned (no
oxymoron, given the latest snapshot Postfix's possibilities, paired with
Courier's maildrop and Openldap 2.2/2.1).

IMAP4 is IMAP4 and ensures tremendous redundancy and virtual data
security across clients. Marc Crispin, its inventor, deserves the Nobel
Prize for something. Probably not chemistry or literature, certainly not
the peace prize, since his UW-IMAP, Cyrus and Courier versions are
constantly at daggers drawn; hate and despise each other. Norwegian
nynorsk poetry fans will recognize Jacob Sande's "I can stand it best,
no, *I* can stand it best" in their harangues.

What I was looking especially at was ease of client implementation,
LDAP/contact/mail quota integration, ease of making and using mail
filters, shared directories, speed, offline directory synchronization
(where applicable), work satisfaction and general client possibilities
such as sending and receiving attachments, spelling checkers, user
prefs, fonts, and message format.

What I wasn't looking at were calendar, tasks, palm sync and other
e-mail peripherals.

The result still has to be written up. But an o.k. précis would
necessarily be that the competition has far fewer possibilities and ease
of use than Evo. With one exception: Evo 1.4.5 doesn't support Courier
IMAP's shared directories. Ximian reports that this /might/ be supported
for some future release, if someone's feeling like programming it at the
time. Pity.

What I still have to do - anybody who can comment here? - is to look at
the Windows IMAP clients with the above setup. Since those are what most
of the high school's clients will be using - unless the people are
surfing from some Internet cafe.

--Tonni

-- 

mail: billy - at - billy.demon.nl
http://www.billy.demon.nl