Re: [Evolution] associate email account with address book entry

[Nick Jenkins <nickpj gmail com>]

> > Secondly because it's directed at the wrong people (end users), when
> > it should be directed at the people who specified the app - the
> > Outlook product managers, or the people who purchased it.
>
> Are you saying home users (who are their own administrator and
> procurement team leader on a one person team) do not use Outlook?  I
> don't believe that for a second.
For sure, home users use Outlook, but the reasons for doing so are
varied. Common reasons are likely to include:
* They use it at home because they also use it at work and do not want
to learn another product or need compatibility with their work systems.
In this case the underlying problem goes back to the office IT folks.
* They buy MS Office for home use and get Outlook as part of the bundle.
That was the situation for me, because around a decade ago there was no
genuinely viable competitor to Office. If I was in that same situation
again now, I'd just download and use OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and treat
the mail client as a separate issue. So this one is increasingly moot.
* The freebie MS mail clients like Outlook Express/Windows Live/Windows
Live Mail are largely what comes with the OS, so there's no explicit
procurement and no/very little administration involved. Use of these
clients is presumably often by default, the same as people using IE
because it's the browser their machine came with.
* Then there are the people who make a deliberate conscious decision.
Presumably because they have specific requirements and stop looking once
those requirements are met.

So some people are explicitly choosing, but many more are influenced by
external factors. Which is just another way of saying there can be
network effects with software.

> Evolution is still relatively broken.  And very unfortunately, it's
> broken in the same way Outlook is: filters.  This means people leaving
> Outlook due to broken filter processing are likely to return to
> Outlook after trying Evolution, which also has broken filters.
The best suggestion I can make is to ensure that any brokenness is
logged in bugzilla. When I migrated from Outlook I noticed a lot of
things, and tried my best to log them all, even if they were small. Some
were closed as wont-fix, some were inadvertent dupes, some are still
pending, but a great many of them have been resolved and fixed since. If
you find a problem, and it's not logged, then please log it, with as
specific a series of steps as you can, describing exactly what you did,
and what happens versus what should happen. All I can tell you is it's
worked well for me and I'd have no hesitation in recommending that
problems should be logged in bugzilla. For example, I saw in the "Re:
[Evolution] filter processing stops after 1st filter executes" thread a
description of a filtering problem, but I couldn't tell if it had been
logged yet.

Ideally, post the bug numbers here, so that anyone who wants more info
about the problem can look into it and track it easily.

-- All the best,
Nick.