Havoc's Blog

Trying to switch to Evolution. The issue is that I have a computer
at home and one at work, and need to read mail both places, with
firewalls in between. So I’ve always just used ssh. People say that
imap will resolve this but I’m skeptical; there’s just so
much stuff in ~/evolution, it seems like when I get to work on
Monday important state will be lost.

I’m especially worried that the messages I’ve tagged Follow Up won’t
be available at work, since I can’t find any annotations in the mbox
files on the server, but I’ll be pretty excited if they are. Follow
Up promises to be a killer feature for me since it might work better
than my mostly-failed system of leaving messages marked unread if I
still need to reply to them or take action.

Evolution really is pretty out of sync with the HIG, and feels sort
of needlessly complex overall, so I’m glad to see all the recent
work in that area. I feel like a
user model diagram for Evolution 1.4 would be pretty
mind-blowing at the moment. My calendar is apparently a folder, for
example. And I spent some time trying to figure out what Follow Up
did, since my immediate expectation was that it would modify my
todo list. Instead there’s some whole separate concept of
“follow up list” – only it seems to be per-folder? I’m not quite
sure what “Send / Receive” does either, or whether Evolution checks
for new mail aside from when I push that button. Oh, and what the
heck does the little envelope with the arrow on it mean? The three
message states seem to be “read”, “unread”, and “little arrow on it”
😉

Anyway, it sure is hard to change mail programs. 😉 I’ve done it
several times in the past (mm->pine->gnus->mutt). I’m finding
Evolution easier to move to than mutt or gnus were, but I would say
Evolution 1.4 is harder to use than pine. I am liking a lot of
things about it though. Some of the features such as Follow Up,
search, etc. are really nice and promise to save time, and I haven’t
seen any serious bugs or misbehaviors.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2003-09.html#7)