Last night I got very irritated with IMAP. Well in fairness, I got irritated at evolution because it insisted on showing me a prefix of Mail/ to all my folders. Every other mail client in existence can be configured to ignore this prefix as there’s no reason for the physical layout of your mail store to be reflected in how it’s conceptually layed out.
Anyway, I thought I’d try a new IMAP server to make things better. I switched from uw-imap to dovecot. I chose that because it works ok with mbox format. I’m not ready to switch all my mail to Maildir format yet. Installation was a breeze thanks to the port. I ran it alongside the existing server for a short while to confirm that everything worked ok. Thankfully, there are good migration instructions. I would have made better progress if I’d read them first. 🙂
So after upgrading the mail server, I went back to evolution. Unfortunately, after all that effort, I found that I didn’t like it terribly much. It seems to have much of the same functionality as thunderbird, but the interface is a lot more cluttered. Also, the folder subscription mechanism doesn’t appear to work for me, so I end up with lots of folders that I don’t want to see…
I think I’ll come back to it when I upgrade to Ubuntu Hoary, which has gnome 2.10 and should include a newer version of Evolution. For now, I’ll stick with thunderbird.
Jabbering Giraffe 