Re: [Evolution] Final Leap

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 12:44 -0400, Wise, Jeremey wrote:
> Ok, I have used evolution for several weeks now as my production system.
> I just received my new laptop and finished installing SuSE 9.0 on it and
> have a few questions and looking for direction.
>
> 1) SuSE 9.0 has EVO 1.4 support. Is 1.5x worth the jump or a better way
> to put it.. is it stable enough for a person of reasonable technical
> savy-ishness?
If you only use email, it should be at least, if not more stable than 1.4, for a given snapshot (the odd bad snapshot comes out, but that usually just means some feature doesn't work quite right than real instability).

I can't recall if we package snapshots for suse 9.0 tho (?).
> 2) I am finding that many of my emails were saved and archived into
> offline PO with Outlook 2003 and I will have to boot that up and do some
> form of import. My thought was to drag them back into a new "Archive"
> folder but their are a couple of issues with that.
> 	a) I have a 50MB limit on my mailbox and with diagrams and such we are
> looking at about 350MB. That is a lot of copy-up copy-down. 
> 	b) To archive them on my laptop for referenced or searching I will need
> to create the archive folder in my "Local Folders" mailbox which stores
> all contents in ~/evolution. It appears that mail storage is in a single
> file (similar to what Outlook did). What impact will this have on
> searching based on key words in the subject or body? (aka Outlook was
> next to impossible to locate historical data or find notes on an old
> case or issue).
If you have indexing on, it will slow down adding to a mailbox somewhat (depending on how many messages you add at a time and other factors - in normal/light use its no slower than network download delays), but searching is very fast.

I've got about 1GB of email spread over 20odd folders.  My biggest folder is just under 200MB, it has body indexing turned on, and all indices take a total of about 10MB of extra disk space.  I can do a body search for a simple word (no punctuation etc), in under 2 seconds on a Pentium M 1.5Ghz box.  Evo uses a lot of memory though - tradeoff.  Certain operations, like labbeling messages or expunging deleted messages will require a mailbox rewrite - but that isn't much slower than a file copy, not interactive, but its usually acceptable.

If you have a lot of big mails with attachments then searching/indexing is even more efficient since only text parts are indexed.
> 	c) Is their an import tool from an Outlook Archive?
There's a tool called outport I think?  And the libpst code also has a tool to dump a PST file into a set of standard unix mailboxes; i don't know whether those tools provide what you need.  Use google, or freshmeat to find them.

Another alternative is to setup an imap account in outlook, and use the imap account to do the copying.
> 	*** Maybe the issue here is that I still do not understand the function
> and resouce ability of "VFolders" I have lurked on the list for some
> time and they apear to be only usefull for building searching / views of
> emails but can someone point me to "VFolder 101 Primer"
None exist that I know of :-/  Its one of those things you try and love or never really use.
> 3) My end goal is to have all inbound email for my Exchange user come in
> and be moved "offline" after being sorted. I would aSSume that this
> would mean moving all email from my jeremey wise agilysys com mailbox to
> my "Local Folders" mailbox. Would this mean that I create a rule that
> move "*" to folder "Local Folders\inbox" then run rules to sort?
Hmm, if you wanted everything locally i'd probably just use pop + filters.

The filters will be run on everything coming in, and any messages which don't match any filters get left in Inbox.

This is a typical usage scenario, and how i do my email.

Michael Zucchi <notzed ximian com> Ximian Evolution and Free Software Developer

Novell, Inc.