Alan Cox: >> Evolution really can't cope with large amounts of mail. Thats one big >> reason I moved to claws. The fact everything else was suddenely faster >> was a big boon. Fernando Cassia: > I remember my first or second e-mail to this list when I complained > about Evolution being the default for Fedora and upset the quite vocal > Evolution fan base... > > ;-) > > Thunderbird should be a much better default. I couldn't care less if > Evolution is part of the Gnome software collection. I've tried many different mail clients across several different operating systems, most suck in some way, many suck in many ways. As things stand, I rate Thunderbird as even worse than Evolution, but Evolution as the least worst one currently available to me. Some of the things I look for are: Must handle IMAP in a sane way. How quotes are handled in replies, in particular multi-generational quotes. They should be prefixed with ">" symbols NEATLY, no straggled spaces, no mixes of spaces and no-spaces, no mangling of line wrapping, including not wrapping text into the middle of quote prefixes. I should be able to see a block of one person's text as a neat block, and not have to count > symbols to tell one person's text apart from another (when they're neatly stacked ">>>>" you can just look how far the text is from the left margin, to see if two paragraphs are the same person, or a quote then a response). And straggled > symbols, combined with bad wrapping, is a cut and paste nightmare when you need to copy bits of messages. In computing terms, this sort of thing (quote prefixing and line wrapping) is old hat, but so many clients are so utterly crap at managing this. Text must be WYSIWYG. No changing of the content after I stop typing and hit send. Text wrapping should happen as I type, and I should be able to cancel it at will (i.e. highlight a block and make it manually hard formatted). Thunderbird really sucked at that. It treats everything as (bad) HTML, even received plain text messages. Which leads to quoting annoyances, where > becomes |, or some of them do, and you have cluttered abominations of them in combinations. Threading must be done properly. And a three-pane GUI is a must for stepping through lots of mail fast, and without getting windows all over the place (which are slow to open, and you're never quite sure which message will be opened "next" with their next button), and having to shuffle windows around like cards on a tiny table is a major pain. The program must be fast. Evolution has some horrible things, here. Like not being able to do two things at once. e.g. Move a batch of selected messages from one spot to another, then try to read another message, and I wait forever for the first task to finish before it loads the message I want to read. The program must use a neat GUI. I find Thunderbird a waste of screen real estate, and that's a problem with a laptop that only has a 800 pixel height screen. Other clients shove gazillions of GUI gadgets all over the place, not only wasting screen space, but they're in a disorganised array, and stick out like a sore thumb for not being anything like my window manager theme (e.g. Windows 3 looking GTK stuff in a Gnome environment - it's not only ugly, but some GUIs have the most horrible renditions of drop-down boxes, and checkmarks that make it hard to tell what's checked or unchecked). Thunderbird seems to be quite CPU intensive with its GUI. And text based clients are often horrible at dealing with long messages, or long lists of messages. It needs good filtering (mail sorting into folders I want, hiding/showing of folder content on certain criteria - e.g. recent mail showing by default, the rest hidden until I need it). Evolution sucks at this, it's too damn slow (at least when sorting mail with a local IMAP server). I gave up on filtering, and once every month, or so, I use the filter to show messages to "fedora-list," and drag the lot into my fedora list archive folder. It must handle HTML decently. I need to be able to read HTML mail sent to me, and I need to be able to read badly authored HTML. I really hate being sent 6px height light grey text on lighter grey background. Evolution's quite bad at this, I've found Thunderbird to be even worse. HTML authoring's also important, there's times when you need to give a neat table of things to people, and a HTML table is the *only* way to do it. It must handle attachments well, including ones sent with the wrong MIME type. I don't mind manually saving then doing something, but some of them make even that a pain to do. I've used clients which would VERY usefully let you delete attachments, so when someone sends you a 10 meg file on a mail that you need to keep, you can keep the mail in your mail system, without wasting 10 megs of space, as well. You could also delete the HTML sections of multi-part mails. That was another very pleasant feature. It must handle GPG/PGP well. It must be integrated, and not need special extra configuration for itself that gets out of step with my general GPG configuration. It should be configurable that it doesn't try to confirm a message unless I click on something (e.g. the signature icon in the message display). Auto check all signed mail, auto-check if I've already got the key, auto get the key, should all be done in the manner that I select in my settings. It's a sodding pain that reading signed mail is a slow down, even if I've already got the key it's a slowdown. Out of all these criteria, and a few others that I can't recall at the moment, Evolution still manages to be the least worst, overall. > I still believe in the "best of breed" approach to applications. Just > because something is developed alongside other app it doesn't mean a > distro has to automagically adopt it as its default. > > For instance there's little reason not to use VideoLan (VLC) as the > standard media player in Linux.... I find it even slower to get started than any of the alternatives, and a bit CPU heavy. So that's quite a nuisance when you're file managing (e.g. double click on something in a list of other things, to work out what's what, and there's an awful lot of waiting involved). RhythmBox is also quite heavy, with all that baggage of being a library of all your files, which is quite painful when my music collection is on the file server, accessed via NFS. And Totem is a behemoth that doesn't let you do much (few codecs included, few remote ones ever found, etc.). -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.25-78.2.56.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
