Thots on evolution vs t'bird.

[Alan Johnson]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Jan 11, 2009 at 1:02 PM, Steven W. Orr <steveo at syslang.net> wrote:
> > But the proliferation of html and other attachments is wearing me
> > down ...
>
>  I've been using Gmail for years, long enough that I've fogotten most
> of my Pine skills, but...


Ah, Pine.  How I long for thee.

ahem.  OK, enough of that.

I too gave up on Thunderbird in favor of gmail some years ago.  I used to be
so addicted to Thunderbird that I would pop my gmail into it.  Now I find
the search capabilities of gmail so dang convenient (and I even like the
little adds some times too!) that I forward things there when I don't want
to loose them.  I'll even send myself emails with items I want to find
later.  They have off-line storage in developement (turn it on now at your
own risk) so you can get to it when you are not on line!  That's right, off
line webmail.  Say what?!

Anyway, Thunderbird is a rocking email client that I still love, but alas,
have no need for.  I suggest using it if it fits your needs.

Evolution is much more than a mail client.  It is really intended to be a
direct replacement for Outlook (not Express, but full blown Outlook) and it
does a decent job of that.  If you have to talk to an Exchange server, as I
do at work, it is a must have.  I rarely have to boot my Vista VM these
days, and never to use Outlook.

Large chunks of features, like tasks and calendaring, are still very buggy
in my experience, but nothing a geek like me would mind too much, expecially
since it gives me a way to contribute to the Ubuntu community by adding to
bug reports.  I use both tasks and Calendar almost daily and have survived
so far, so nothing too terrible.  In fact, I like the tasks UI better than
Outlook, except that it used to crash all the time until I installed a
hack.  I like a lot about the Evolution UI over Outlook, now that I think
about it.  Surprised?

Also, there is a slightly newer version than what I am running because I
don't want to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10 from 8.04.  The newer version includes
the hacks I have installed to fix some bugs and much more.  However, I have
been warned away from it because they did a complete rewrite of the storage
engine using SQLite.  Not that there is anything wrong with SQLite, in fact
I'm sure it is an improvement in the long run, but it is relatively young
code in a project notroius for bugs (one of my coworkers calls it
de-evolution).  I'm not sure if it matters what the default local storage
engine is if you use an exchange server or IMAP, but I really want to stay
on 8.04 as long as I can anyway because it is Long Term Support (3 years
instead of 1.5) and I run it on my employer's laptop so I don't want to mess
with my productivy right now by upgrading and risking breaking something
else.  (I've not had good luck with upgrading Ubuntu, always have to do a
wipe to get it right, even then something is broken that was not before.)

My wife uses Evolution for calendaring and contacts (syncs with her palm,
gmail for email), and has no complaints at all.  She has run whatever
version came with 7.04, 7.10, 8.04, and now is running the latest Evolution
with 8.10 for a coupole of months and has had no issues.  I expect most of
my issues are tied to Exchange specific code.

One more plug for gmail: gmail has a much better spell checker than either
one.

And in the spirit of others, this is just one man's opinion.  It just
happens that it is the right one.  Unlinke my spelling.

__________________
Alan Johnson
alan at datdec.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/private/gnhlug-discuss/attachments/20090111/9bb88d48/attachment-0001.html