Several years ago I switched from Thunderbird to Evolution. I do not remember why.
To document why I switch from Evolution to Thunderbird a blogpost.
What sucks about Evolution:
- It crashes a lot (frustration)
- No or little improvement with new releases (disappointment)
- Terribly slow, at least with multiple large IMAP accounts (anger)
Whats nice? Gnome integration, your tasks in the clock.
The endless frustration, disappointment en frequent anger convinced me to switch back to Thunderbird, together with the Lightning plugin which facilitates my agenda needs, I am ready to switch.
Before someone starts rambling about filing bug reports. I find evolution bugs terribly hard to trace and the few times I did check, the bug were already filed in threefold.
Now I realise that Thunderbird probably didn’t get perfect in the last two years, I am just too fed up to keep using evolution. I don’t have much time to tinker much so it will probably take a few weeks to switch. I intend to blog about the hurdles and hopefully success.
No related posts.
Good luck on the transition. I moved the opposite direction earlier this year and I’m still pretty happy I made the change. I do have several crashes a day if I have Evo open too long but there’s one thing keeping me from looking back too longingly: Too freakin’ many decisions fro Mozilla devs that make me feel they’re more interested in getting new users than in keeping old users, granted in Firefox but I have to wonder how many similar decisions the MozMess crew will make.
Just today I see that the bug filed against the move of the new tab icon in Firefox 3.1 (to give users the chance to keep the button where they’re not only used to it being but is a much more usable location) flat won’t be fixed in time for Firefox 3.1. We’ll have to use yet another remove-on to get the old behavior back. It’s things like that that keep me from even looking at Songbird and make me wish I could kick Mozilla to the curb like I did for Windows a year or so ago.
try using Thunderbird from trunk[1], since it uses xulrunner1.9 and thus integrates better with GTK.
You should also install Lighning[2] to get a nice calendar.
[1] http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/thunderbird/nightly/latest-trunk/
[2] http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/calendar/lightning/nightly/
I’m a user and I have experienced the same problems with Evolution. As a user, it sucks to very little improvement especially on a bunch of little stuff like making new email and appointment notification better, improving integration within gnome (there are many possibilities), better localization support for different dates formats, address formats, phone number formats, etc that are different in every country. The list goes on and on and on, but it’s so frustrating that an application that I use can’t get those things in order, but also things like bugs. I can’t tell you how many times the spam filter stops working in Evolution amongst other things.
I can fully follow your motivation, same issues here. I also have to deal with
several IMAP accounts, and this can be painful with Evolution. Sometimes
it simply seems to fail to store sent messages, filtering takes ages, and
it hardly ever manages to quit cleanly.
I have tried quite some alternatives, like Sylpheed (basically great, but some
IMAP issues those days), Mulberry (great IMAP support, but horrible GUI under
Linux), Zimbra Desktop (too beta, and fat Java app), and of course Thunderbird.
I wasn’t happy with Thunderbird either when I tried it about a year ago,
especially the IMAP support was frustrating, simple things like refreshing
the folder-list was not possible (at least I didn’t manage). Thus, when I
added a folder with another client, I could not make this visible under
Thunderbird. Maybe this is better now, but if I change again, I will have
another look at Sylpheed, first.
Still waiting for the real-great email app… In principle I like Evolution,
the GUI is fine, but it should live up to its name more quickly…
As for ‘your tasks in the clock’, give Dates and Tasks (from the Pimlico suite, packages dates and tasks) a chance. These are very lightweight frontends to Evolution Data Server, and so items edited in them show up in the clock applet.
I have tried ( recently..)
Clawsmail
Icedove
Thunderbird
Evolution
and I ended up back at Kontact/Kmail, even in a gnome environment.
They all had issues with IMAP accounts, and kmail works.
I have been using evolution for about 3years now and I have rarely seen a crash…well people have different tastes I guess, Thunderbird is definitely not my cup of tea. I use a windows mobile phone and Evolution syncs all my tasks, calendar and contacts without much fuss through OpenSync. It have native support for Google Calendar built in and in Ubuntu Intre pid, it’s runs more faster. I haven’t had any problems accessing large IMAP accounts on it either.
I can only speak for myself and I would recommend Evolution over Thunderbird to anybody.
I’m in the same boat you are. I feel the difference is that Thunderbird is designed around mail servers on the internet. Evolution is designed around mail servers for an intranet. Evolution just doesn’t do handle mail cleanly, and seems to require the mail server to handle most of the usability load. Most problems in evolution boil down to “fix the server”.
Thunderbird isn’t perfect, but it works where it needs to. Really looking forward to the new Thunderbird releases.
Use Shredder (Thunderbird nightly build), it’s lot more fun (and despite the name, they haven’t had a mail-shredding incident for a very long time, the builds are quite stable), or a plain old TB3 alpha.
Best new ‘feature’ of TB3: Significant improvements to GTK integration.
I made the same switch several months ago. I managed to migrate all my Exchange functionalities (our Exchange supports IMAP) except Calendar, for which I use Google Calendar plug in. Even Contacts works. Let me know if you need help/advice if you are going this route.
I just made the decision to start using a desktop based email client over gmail for the purpose of signing and encrypting emails. I set up both Thunderbird (with Enigmail) and Evolution. I think they both have pros and cons, and neither has got it totally right. I haven’t decided which I’m going to stick with. I’ll look forward to further info from your transition.
Did you file bug reports?
I’m not really sure how old your computer is or your distribution. But I’ve been running Evolution on 18 computers without a single crash for over a year. So maybe all your hate and discontent my be better applied to your hardware. It sounds to me like you’ve been drinking your champagne out of a muddy boot.
As a reply to some of the above:
- I am quite happy with the Evolution UI
- Evolution seems to work quite fine if you don’t have too many or too big imap boxes. At the moment I have 8 IMAP boxes and one of them is quite big (multi GB). I have the feeling its mostly because of the size of the boxes which makes Evolution suck balls.
- John: Its not the hardware, trust me on that. Distribution is hardy (LTS).
I have to agree with PaulC, Kontact/Kmail is by far the best of breed for PIMs on GNU/Linux. Both Evolution and TBird have their pros and cons, and whichever one I use I find myself missing some important(to me) feature.
I’ve got Evolution right now(waiting for TBird 3 or Spicebird to mature), since it ships as default in Ubuntu 8.10, but I find myself using the browser(FF3) to access my inbox most of the time. Gnome+Compiz+Kontact/Kmail unfortunately seems to stress out my aging desktop a bit too much.
About the problem with Evolution and the big inboxes check the bugs below, they might solve the problem:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=558883
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution-data-server/+bug/292739
or in short: find all folders.db, go to their folders and execute:
for i in `sqlite3 folders.db .tables`; do sqlite3 folders.db “CREATE INDEX IF NOT EXISTS ‘junk_$i’ ON ‘$i’ (junk)”; done
for i in `sqlite3 folders.db .tables`; do sqlite3 folders.db “CREATE INDEX IF NOT EXISTS ‘del_$i’ ON ‘$i’ (deleted)”; done
for i in `sqlite3 folders.db .tables`; do sqlite3 folders.db “CREATE INDEX IF NOT EXISTS ‘read_$i’ ON ‘$i’ (read)”; done
Regards,
Anatoliy
I prefer KDE over GNOME, but I like apt, I don\’t like KDE Kubuntu\’s implementation, so I ended up using Ubuntu GNOME since 2 years ago.
The only application I can tell that gives me problems is Evolution.
I really miss Kontact.
Welcome back. Thunderbird rocks.
Unfortunately having proper features and support for calendaring means you’ll need a version installed manually, even in Intrepid. Don’t take my word for it, but the only way I found to have all the features I wanted in Ubuntu was by using Ubuntuzilla. Fortunately TB has its own update mechanism.
I used Icedove for quite a while but found TB2 to use way too much CPU (have a look at CPU usage while just moving the mouse over the message list).
Tried Evolution several times, but it never seemed very reliable or quick, and in the end didn\’t offer any further functionality anyway (using a remote calendar has so far never worked for me, and that was the only feature I\’m interested in).
So now I use Claws Mail which does just mail and which has its fair share of problems (like switching between IMAP folders takes several seconds; LDAP address book is prone to crashing) but so far has been very _reliable_ – I know which actions are slow or unstable. Plus it seems to have very responsive developers; I\’ve once filed a bug report for a very vague but annoying bug, and it was looked at by several knowledgeable devs pretty immediately and was fixed less than a day later. That\’s encouraging.
(oh… looks like when entering a wrong captcha text, the blog software adds backslashes for single quotes in the text… sorry, I noticed it too late)
I have many of the same experiences. I\’ve given Evolution several tries because of the nice Gnome integration, but I always end up kicking it out after a week or two.
It\’s been a while since the last time I\’ve given it a try. Now it\’s one of the first things to go after a fresh install.
Man.. some of your security codes are _really_ hard to read!
I just tried Thunderbird again myself. It does use a lot of CPU, but I can live with that. What I dislike is that I have procmail move messages to my various imap folders and Thunderbird does not scan all folders for new mail, or if it does, doesn’t give any indication what folders the new mail is in. Granted I’ve only been using Thunderbird for 45 minutes now, but I hope there is a way to configure the scan all folders or selected folders for new mail.