[Evolution] Feedback & suggestions

[Stefan Nitsche <junk stefan gmail com>]

Hi!

With Evolution now supporting Google Contacts it takes yet another step 
to replace Mozilla Thunderbird on my desktop. (Yes this is written with 
presumption that someone actually cares what I use to read emails and 
with the hope that someone else will benefit from the feedback also.)

When I saw the announcement I thought I'd take this opportunity to 
express my opinions.

My biggest gripe with Evolution is the handling of headers. I use Gmail 
over IMAP and it works really great except when "from" contains 
non-ascii characters.  An email that is sent from someone called "Pär" 
looks like this "=?ISO-8859-1?Q? P=E4r_". Now as far as I understand 
this is caused by faulty/wrong configured Gmail-server and is not an 
real bug in Evolution. However for me as an end-user the result is the 
same no matter where the problem lies. Thunderbird handles this 
gracefully and gives me the expected name so it is possible to make a 
workaround. My wish and suggestion to the Evolution team is to implement 
this workaround as a service to the end-user. It doesn't have to be 
enabled by default and if possible is should perhaps be a plugin.

Speaking of headers it would be cool to have a plugin like Thunderbirds 
MessageFaces for Evolution. I like having the Gravatar displayed in the 
message header. This is filed under cool-but-entirely-unnecessary

Another cool-but-not-necessary addition would be a RemeberTheMilk.com 
provider for Tasks (and why not a Google Notes, or equivalent service,  
provider for Memos). Gnome Online Desktop anyone?

When we are talking about wishes I would also like to add my wishes for 
either:

1. A really good threaded mode. It should be really clear which messages 
that are threaded (it is not at the moment IMHO) and threadeds should be 
sorted by the newest message, i.e. a thread started a week ago 
containing a message that arrived today should be sorted as newer than a 
message that arrived yesterday. (This could be the case already though)

OR

2. A really good wide view. Evolution already does this very well when 
comparing to the mail apps I've tried (excluding Outlook). But... When 
comparing Evolution to Outlook the message list feels very "heavy" in 
Evolution. It's a bit hard to explain but hopefully I make some sense.

Finally, these additions to Evolution would make my day but as always 
there is this thing called reality. I don't know how the developer 
situation looks like for Evolution but I wouldn't be surprised if you're 
shorthanded.

Anyways keep up the good work!

//Stefan Nitsche