F**k you Evolution

… the great PIM – program created by … who cares. I’m really pissed right now.

First of all a little explanation:

I use a little strange setup. My evolution related folders, like ~/local/share/evolution, ~/.config/evolution and so on are stored on an encrypted USB-Stick, which I carry with my. I’ve created symlinks on my notebook and my desktop to this usb-stick, to get evolution work properly.

From time to time evolution just “evolves” (hahaha … not funny) itself and all is f**ked up. This happened right now. My Addressbook screwed up over a year ago and I was unable to fix it. This pissed me off the first time, but I got all my address on my old mobile phone.

Try to get some support … they can’t help you. I’m moving away from evolution now. I just don’t like it anymore! I’ve read a little about some alternatives and found Claws Mail and Sylpheed.

At the moment I prefer Claws, which is a little longer on “the market”. The first step is to migrate my mail. Some of them are more than 10 years old, a good reason to keep them. As I saw, Claws supports mbox import, Evolution mbox export and I think I found my export/import interface.

Well, the Import seems to be a little crappy and aborts very often. I’ve just changed my email-account type to imap and copied all (local) folders to the new account. This is incredible slow, but working properly. Datetimes are preserved and I think I like it.

If this fails I’m going to write a little script which will do the upload for me.

But some fact about Evolution (it is still a good piece of software I guess)

• IMAP(s)/POP3(s) Client
• SMTP(s) support
• Exchange connector (never tried it)
• Calendar
• Address book
• ToDos
• Notes

Local and IMAP folders are indexed, allowing Evolution to really search fast. Another cool feature which I really miss in Claws are the so called vFolders (v for vendettavirtual). I saw them in MS Outlook first and liked them so much. They allow you to “group” emails matching one or more pattern in a folder (the vFolder). I have a lot of mailtraffic and a lot of folders which are filled by rules. My most used vFolder is “unread”, which contains all emails marked as not read

But why does he moves away you might ask. Well, as I said I am just sick of it. Evolution works like a charm with some mails, my archive is ~2G big, which is not that much since 2000 but it becomes slower over the years. Additionally it just wrecked my address book, which is not that cool!

ClawsMail is a little bit more “simpler”. By saying simpler I mean elementary. The iconset was made the year I was born I guess (1985), the program does not support vFolders (which really hurts) but renders emails damn fast. I’ve opened my other IMAP inbox in claws just to make sure it works properly and saw the speed … wow.

I like the fact that there is a easy accessible networklog, which is very verbose.

Well, I’ll update you ASAP if the IMAP upload was successful.