Hello, I've been having some performance problems with Thunderbird, so I thought I would give Evolution 2.8.1 a shot (on Ubuntu Edgy).
I'm most concerned about the reduced keyboard usability of Evolution, so I'll cover that first, and then provide miscellaneous feedback beyond that. Although I had to install several extensions to accomplish it, I was able to make Thunderbird 1.5 rather keyboard-friendly. I'd like to know if there are Evolution shortcuts I'm missing to match the efficiency I've found with Thunderbird. (An article about my Thunderbird setup is here: http://www.summersault.com/community/weblog/2006/07/20/five-power-tips-for-thunderbird.html ) With TB, I can quickly label messages as Important, Work or Personal with 1, 2 and 3. It seems to the do the same in Evo, I would have to type: Shift-F10-L-M, (Important) Shift-F10-L-W, (Work) Shift-F10-L-P (Personal) Ouch. I'm starting to investigate if the "Important" notation and the "Flag" feature are better alternatives in Evo. With the GmailUI extension, I can use just "y" to quickly file a message to a default archive folder, like Gmail. Evo seems to have no such concept or extension. The closest I can come is "Control-Shift-V" for "Move". And then *only if the folder name has been exposed*, I can start typing "archive" to find the match. This limitation of only searching visible folder names this way was especially frustrating when searching for the "evolution" news group. The search feature does not good unless you have already selected "comp" and then "gnome", at which point you've already found "evolution"! ( I did discover that Shift - Right arrow will open up one of the triangle folder widgets. ) Likewise, with the Nostalgy extension, I can type "g" and then any unique part of a folder name to go there. In Evo, I first need to use F6 to go the folder pane, which I need to keep exposed for only this reason. Then again, only if the folder is already visible (not collapsed), am I able to use type folder name to search for it. Also, the missing ability to use an external editor is a huge blow to keyboard-centric users. This is especially sad since someone did the work to integrate vim with Evo three years ago: http://www.opensky.ca/~jdhildeb/software/gnome-vim/ The best alternative in Evo seems to be copy/pasting back and forth, and using "Insert File" in some cases. One more keyboard detail: When viewing a newsgroup list, TB does the sensible thing with "Control-N" in this context and opens a compose window addressed to the list. In Evol, there's "Post New Message to Folder", but there's no keyboard shortcut for that, and the concept seems wrong. I don't want to post to the folder, I want to post to the group! I see I'm not the only person who had trouble figuring out this task: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2007-February/msg00104.html With all the keyboard grumbling out of the way, I have some other feedback to share, including some positive things. :) - Well, so far I have definitely had better performance. The IMAP performance seems to beat the pants of Claws-Mail, at least for the initial load. I suspect this is because Evo is only loading folders "on demand", while Claws-Mail tried to load all subscribed folders at once, bogging down on some folders with thousands of messages in them. On the other hand, sometimes NNTP performance was worse, because Evo doesn't seem to have a limit to the number of messages downloaded like TB offers, so it bogged down on some bigger lists. - Of course it's nice that Evo integrates very nicely with the Gnome desktop. I'm enjoying trying out the groupware integration features including "convert mail to task" and sending and accepting events by E-mail. I have an idea to work on a little gateway script that converts natural language event descriptions (like Google Calendar's quick adds), and converts them into a proper ICS attachments. In this way, you could quickly send a new event to Evolution from your cell phone! - Evo has a real, full-featured address book. I like the sync-with-Gaim feature. However, I was hoping the photos from Gaim would show up when I received a message from someone who had a Gaim photo. - The plain test formatting toolbar through me off at first (I assumed it was for HTML), but I like the concept. However, I quickly ran into missing features that real text editors have, like "rewrap this paragraph". - I appreciated that my labels and colors from TB were preserved. - I like that encryption support came built-in. Aside from the important keyboard efficiency issues, I'm generally impressed with the features and ease-of-use that Evolution offers. Mark _______________________________________________ Evolution-list mailing list Evolution-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list
