[Evolution] Various strange actions by Evolution

["David A Vavra" <davavra verizon net>]

I'm rather new to Evolution which may explain some of this but I've been
having the following difficulties with Evolution. I'm not sure if they are
caused by bugs or my ineptitude.

        1. The properties dialog  for Inbox shows 25 messages but is only
displaying 3 of them. These were initially marked as unread. Initially, I
couldn't even get those three. They suddenly showed up after many minutes.
Why?

        2. I'm currently paralleling my e-mail with Outlook. My custom is to
leave the mail on the server for about a week. There were far more than 3
new messages available but Evolution only found  3? Why is that?

        3. Similarly, the SearchFolders/Unmatched is showing 14 Unread; 220
total but no display. Maybe this never does display?

        4. I made several filters some of which moved the messages to
folders other than the one selected by the filter. For example, I have a
folder named BoA. A lot of the messages appeared there instead of in the
proper targets.

        5. I tried moving one of the messages with drag and drop. That
message has completely disappeared. This has happened twice.

        6. So, I tried using the menu "Move to.." command. This seems to
work but sometimes I get a red message saying [paraphrased] "No directory
./local/#xxx" where "xxx" is the directory I selected from the dropdown
list. This seems to happen if I try moving more than one message at a time.
I note a "#" where a '.' should be.

        7. Some messages appear to have been permanently lost. That is, I
can't find them anywhere.

        8. The account I'm using is a plain old POP3 with no encryption.
Initially, I had many problems getting Evolution to read from it. Some of
the difficulty may have arisen after I used the dialog option to see if an
encrypted login was available. For a long time after that, I kept getting a
message that STLS was unavailable and no connection would be made. This
mysteriously stopped after awhile. It was very frustrating.

        9. Not particularly important, but it's difficult to tell if
Evolution is actually checking for incoming mail. A dialog pops up for all
of 200 msec. without any new mail being displayed. I can't tell if there was
a problem or if there simply was no new mail. Is there some way to get
persistent status info?

        10. Clicking on the Read/Unread icon in the column headers (whatever
it's called) does not sort the messages properly. At least I can't make all
of the unread messages in a folder rise to the top. I assume it's supposed
to sort because it displays up and down carets. 

The most important, IMO, is the recovery of lost messages. Considering that
the current version is 3.02, I'm surprised that any of the above have
happened. Is Evolution still in the Alpha stage? I wanted to switch to
Evolution from Outlook currently running on one of my Vista machines but I
guess I'm going to have to wait.  Evolution has a lot of the look and feel
of Outlook. This may be what's tripping me up

The version I'm using is:

Name     : evolution
Arch     : x86_64
Version  : 3.0.2
Release  : 3.fc15

I'm running under the XFCE desktop using the Gnome (3) display manager.