Evolution 1.5 has Been Released

SirPrize writes "As announced here, Evolution 1.5 is now available for download (obligatory screenshots, for those who want to click and see)" Congrats to all the developers responsible for this gigantic undertaking.

Java Desktop

[gbjbaanb]

You'd think Sun'd sponsor them a little wouldn't you? What they're doing helps Sun's push for their desktop one hell of a lot.

Hmm. Time for another trial

[Space cowboy]

I don't seem to have much luck with mail clients recently - Mozilla (1.4) often barfs when I get japanese spam - really annoying because I have to delete my Inbox and my POP3 spool :-(, before that, an earlier version of Evolution took all my mail and made it unreadable :-((

Say it quietly, but through all my trials of mail on Linux, Outlook has just worked :-( It's bloody annoying, but there you go. Actually I think it may be the X server screwing up mozilla, so maybe the new version of Evolution will have the same problems. If so, it may be time to junk the venerable G400 and go for a newer card which can do dual display...

Any excuse :-)

Simon

S/MIME support?

[Cthefuture]

Is S/MIME support new for this release? I poked around on the site some and it looks like it is but I couldn't find any more information about it.

How are certificates and keys managed? Does it (hopefully) use a PKCS#11 module like Mozilla?

I don't know why more stuff doesn't use S/MIME early on. PGP/GPG and the others are not really standard and don't work off-the-shelf with a lot of big software (Mozilla and Outlook being two of them).

Re:Hmm. Time for another trial

[Malc]

You don't use Outlook enough. Ever had to run the scanpst.exe utility? When I hit the "Send/Receive" button in Outlook XP at the moment, I get a dialog saying "The operation failed". The other day I ran into a whole bunch of issues when one of my folders that mailing list messages filters to hit 64Ki messages.

Fedora Core 1 not supported

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried installing it just now. Their install program says it does not recognize my distribution .. and will not let me install

I am using Fedora Core 1

Ximian Connector

[Chuck Bucket]

Is there ANY way to try out the Ximian Connector before buying it? I can't convince my company to buy it for me, even though I'm on a Linux workstation running all of the *nix boxes in house. (I run rdesktop to connect to a win box to check my email via Outlook - which is a waste). I want to try it, and would gladly buy it myself if I thought it worked fine. Or, can anyone testify to it's usefulness? Evoltion has come such a long way in the past year, I really want to start using that fulltime.

CB

Won't be going anywhere near my systems...

[Tet]

It's more bloated than emacs. And that's saying something. But more than that, it's the wrong approach. The world doens't need a huge integrated app that tries to do aeverything under the sun. We need small, well desgined apps that do exactly what they say on the tin, and that work well together. The GNOME project is in dire need of a calendaring tool, but after they discontinued gnome-pim, Evolution is the only option. I already have a mail program, and I'm not about to switch (Evolution doesn't give me the functionality I need, for a start). Unfortunately, there's no way to get at the calendaring without taking the whole lot. And the calendaring doesn't seem to work anyway... it doesn't give me a popup when a meeting is due. Which makes it pretty useless :-(

bayesian spam filter?

[pyros]

Anyone know when that is going to be added. I remember seeing some posts about getting started on it on the developer mailing list after 1.4 was released, but I don't see mention of it.

Re:Hmm. Time for another trial

[Space cowboy]

Well, I dunno about that, not that I'm defending Outlook at all - virus-prone piece of sh1t that it is, but since I use POP, I get the same email (in the office) as I do at home.

What I like about Mozilla is the spam filter - fantastic. In the morning I spend 5 minutes filtering mail in outlook, only about 10 seconds in Mozilla. On average I get maybe 400 emails per day, of which about 300-350 are spam. That's because I'm the 'catchall' for the domains though...

If people didn't send me bloody word documents, I'd ditch windows immediately, but Open Office and abiword aren't up to standard yet, for documents that I get sent...

Simon

Exchange attachemts supported? (TNEF Mime types)

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell me that Exchange/Outlook encoded attachments work now!

Evolution is driving me nuts. While I lothe Exchange, and there are tools for dealing with Exchange (TNEF) attachments, they are clumsy and have caused me no end of headaches.

I'd even buy a copy of Ximian Connector if that were an option (it isn't; we're using Exchange 5.5x here).

Switching to POP and SMTP means that all attachments from the Exchange server are in TNEF format. Using tools like tnefclean (tnefclean.pl) are causing me headaches.

Re:As an Evolution user for about a year...

[SubtleNuance]

Evolution will (shortly) be a very capable PIM. With an OS backend of somekind for scheduling, will cover 95% of the "outlook" users needs. But, Outlook does something that no GNU/Linux PIM does yet these form things [slipstick.com].
Now, Im not trying to say "outlook r0x0r2 and evolution 6r00l2" or somesuch, so please ease up on the "M$ shill" retorts (and the 'outlook is insecure' w/ vb" stuff as well.

What you can do is send forms, with send a form to a user like an email -- the 'form' appears in their inbox). This form, can do whatever you'd like. You can build work-chain dependant systems with them.

Now, I imagine you can do similar via HTML forms and a Apache backend, but ive used these outlook forms before to enable some 'officialdom' instead of attached emails and forms.... and they worked pretty nice. (i built a simple form that made 'offical' communication between two departments and tracked the sending/recieving and reaction -- pretty simple) its pretty interesting.

Re:Dinner

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

around my company, if you don't put lunch & dinner on your calendar and mark it "private appointment" chances are good some schmuck will try and schedule a meeting or a conference call or something during that time...

Re:Won't be going anywhere near my systems...

[ambrosius27]

One of the main goals of the Evolution 5.x/2.0 release is to better separate the different modules, so that separate mail, calendar, task, and contact programs will be much, much easier. The frontend/backend split (i.e. Evolution and evolution-data-server) and simplified APIs will help in this regard, as will the deprecation of the tree-view side-panel. The Evolution hackers are also toying with making stand-alone shells for the calendar, task, contact, and email programs. With the new structure, such separation should be much simpler.

Cheers!

Re:Dinner

[boinger]

I have serious issues, then.

My company, the godsend that it is, buys food for any employee who wants it, but the order can be in no later than 5:20p. (We get to order off or an actual menu from an actual restaurant)

So, I have a Calendar alert pop up daily at 4:55p, or I'd miss out (very often, in fact). I don't get hungry until 6:00p or so, so I have to visually remind myself to order if I *think* I'll still be here at 6:30p (when the food arrives)

I know it was meant as funny, but it is useful for people like me who can forget to pee for 6 hours because their brain is 'on a roll' with soemthing.

Re:Hmm. Time for another trial

[Theatetus]

Say it quietly, but through all my trials of mail on Linux, Outlook has just worked

You've never supported Outlook for others, I take it? It does several weird things with POP3. Take, for instance, this recent problem I've been having where Outlook thinks that a messages is 48KB in size when in fact it's only 46KB. It downloads the 46KB, doesn't get any more for that message, tries again, and again, and again, until it chokes and dies. This one guy had 500Megs of that one message in his inbox, and it never even got removed from the server (neither did anything past it). This is probably the POP server's "fault" (they use Post.Office... *shudder*), but the MDA should definitely be able to handle a fault like that.

Anyways, I'm not bashing Outlook in particular (I think on the whole the Office line is Microsoft's best work), I just find it odd that people are totally used to the bugs in Microsoft programs but think that equally annoying but different bugs somehow bar Linux from the desktop.

Re:I still think...

[cK-Gunslinger]

Uh, no. I would like to think the purpose of releasing OS software for Windows is not to "make a clone," but rather to "supply the same functionality in an application that is open, standards-compliant, and similiar in appearance/use."

A lot of open source developers have the attitude of "anything you can do, we can do better." And this is a good thing. You wouldn't say, "Why run Firebird on Windows? It's just a IE clone, run the real thing," now would you?

Built-in spam filtering?

[FattMattP]

Does anyone know if there are plans to add built-in spam filtering like Mozilla has? Right now everyone says to use spamassassin but that doesn't work for some people that I know that user Evolution. They want something built in to the client end.

pgp

[SupahVee]

The real question I have for the developers is this: when will we ever see decent PGP/GPG support for Evolution? It's hand-down the most feature complete email app available for GNU/Linux, and yet, still can't do PGP even half as good as Pine, Kmail, Enigmail. The only time I get a PGP'ed email that I can read is ONLY if it was sent by another evolution client, which sounds more like the behavior I would expect from LookOut. Hell, the only way I've gotten decent GPG support for Evo is to have Pine reading a folder where I filter encrypted messages into, Pine reads them just fine, Evolution can't. I've looked through all the features that will supposedly be in the 2.0 release, and nowhere is there mentioned any fix of the PGP handling. I don't pretend to know more than the developers, and I'm sure there may be reasons why they've chosen to leave this feature broken, but if every other OSS Email project can nail it, why can't they?

Re:pgp

[0x0d0a]

I've yet to see any client do PGP right.

Mutt comes close, but doesn't have the ability to "opportunistically encrypt" messages -- i.e. encrypt the message if a key for the destination email address can be found, otherwise not.

Using this would help encourage people to use email encryption.

Where's the junk button?

[bobaferret]

I think the most important feature that is currently missing is the spam filtering. Everyone else has it, why doesn't evolution? Use the code from mozilla if you have to.

wish I had the time to do it myself.
-jj-

Still no note/memo support??

[macemoneta]

After all this time and many releases, there is still no support for notes and memos.

Synchronizing to a PDA will exclude these. This was by far one of the most useful aspects of using Outlook with a PDA (the ability to copy any arbitrary text and load it to a PDA as a memo). I had built large collections of travel directions, software/hardware serial numbers, network IP information, reference data, even Xmas lists using this facility.

I'd rather the Evolution team provide function parity before they spend time glitzing the UI.

Re:Dinner

[Tim C]

And in my company, where we're *required* to put lunch in our calendar if we're planning on not being at our desks for it, some schmuck will *still* schedule a meeting during that time.

Version Numbering for Compatibility

[Doc Ruby]

As usual, Evolution's team is doing it right, including the version numbering. We can all learn by their good example.

FTA:
"note that there are still some bugs migrating data from 1.4.x to 1.5 and that 1.5 stores its information in ~/.evolution rather than ~/evolution/ so that if you add new info in 1.5 in will not show up in 1.4.x."

Version numbers should reflect the features and requirements of the software they describe. When I worked for Apple, we recognized that software compatibility depended on both data formats/protocols and user interfaces. MAJOR.minor.revision(.patch/build) numbers reflected interoperability: Adding features, either to the GUI or functionality, that the user could notice, incremented the MAJOR number. Changing data/protocol formats, in the filesystem, over the network, or otherwise (any I/O, like sensors), incremented the minor number. Revision numbers reflected internal changes interesting only to developers, likewise any patch or build numbers. Forward/backward compatibility becomes just another feature/requirement, a special case of any given version, never to be expected unless explicitly included.

With that simple scheme, we could tell whether a version wouldn't interoperate with other software in a suite, or might require retraining (eg, glance at documentation) to use. Or fixed a bug. With those rules, we defended rational version numbering in favor of users (and developers) - defended from the insane ravages of marketdroids who were locked in a version numbering "arms race" with the competition.

Re:less like Outlook, strange UI things

[Coryoth]

As other people have pointed out, this is an unstable development release, not a polished final product. I suspect the varied labelling is due to people coding up different components and putting temporary placeholder strings in for now (if the "Component" isn't a give away placeholder string I don't know what is) while they get the features working. I think you'll find a lot of that will be cleaned up for Evolution 2.0

Jedidiah

Re:As an Evolution user for about a year...

[JohnFluxx]

zope?

Personally we used eclipse+tomcat+struts. It's been working well so far.
The only reason zope was turned down was because of lack of integrated java support. (Personally I'm not convinced that that is a problem...)

Re:Hmm. Time for another trial

[madcow_ucsb]

Ok, I'm probably trolling at this point but....

Good.

Anything that forces users to get off POP3 and use something halfway decent (IMAP anyone?) is a good thing in my book.

It beats having to deal with people who get all their email stuck on their laptop and end up loosing all synchronization with the server and their other systems. With IMAP everything stays on the server, you only download the *headers* you want, you get info on what you've replied to and read, you get multiple folders...

Seriously, why is POP even supported anymore? I don't think I've touched a POP server in about 3 years....

So tell your friends to hit that IMAP button instead of POP and lets let POP die already...

Re:S/MIME support?

[lordholm]

Yes, hardware support seem to be missing. This isn't good, I want to use the Swedish postal services electronic ids (smart-card based) since the S/MIME support in this would allow me to sign LEGALLY BINDING contracts via e-mail.

Then I don't have to meet a person in real life... ever : )