LinuxWorld: Accepting the Theory of Ximian’s Evolution

“It should be against the law to use POP3 for e-mail, and in
anticipation of that law, I’ve used IMAP4 for many years.
Fortunately, Evolution does more than a reasonable job of handling
IMAP4 mail. My only mistake at first was to tell Evolution to scan
all folders for new mail at startup. If you have as many folders
and as much mail as I do, this will force Evolution to take an
eternity to start. Once I disabled this option, Evolution began to
start up very quickly.

“On the surface, it appears as if there’s nothing spectacular
about Evolution in comparison to Mozilla mail. To be fair to
Mozilla Mail, if you dig deep enough, you can find most of the
features you’ll find in Evolution. However, I prefer the way
Evolution integrates things like the advanced search features into
the default graphical interface. You can search the body of
messages, the subject, the subject or body, or select from a number
of other combinations. It not only makes it easier to perform these
sophisticated searches, it makes it plain to the user that these
searches are possible. One might never discover the advanced search
features of Mozilla Mail, simply because you have to search the
interface before you can search your mail.

“The virtual folder feature is an especially dandy addition to
the search mechanism. You can define and save a set of search
criteria that will create a “view” of only the subset of messages
which meet your search conditions. From that point on, all you have
to do is click on the virtual folder to see the current subset of
matching messages. You can create as many of these virtual folders
as you like, but the number of virtual folders can begin to get
overwhelming if you go overboard…”

Complete
Story