Evolution IMAP - learning to live offline

Murray , thanks for all those constructive comments. Much of the problems that you have mentioned stem directly from the still-young-and-improving offline support in Evolution. Primarily,

• the user interface with multiple configuration points that do not clearly tell you what happens (or does not). We are working towards a simpler, intuitive and a 'usable' interface in the current Two Ten dev series.
  
• As you have so rightly mentioned, the download for offline use interferes with the foreground operations. This is a PITA and hopefully we would be letting Evo 2.10 handle this in a more sensible way
  

Until then, the 'Cancel' Button on the toolbar is your friend - it is not a panacea, especially for GW/Exchange accounts - but on IMAP - it works like a charm and gives you the control when you want it back - all the times.

[gnome] [evolution]

Evolution Very Much Alive and Kicking

Jason, an interesting post though I think you got many facts wrong (including my nationality). Grepping mail headers for X-Mailer *Evolution* is indeed a good trick for a quick pulse-check. I would have imagined you would have chosen a similar dipstick on the cvs, the release site or bugzilla to find out if the project was still alive. It is true that triaging Evolution takes a very long time - it tops the 'open bugs' and 'opened last week' stats but - oh yes, it tops the 'closed last week' column week after week too, thanks to a lot of GNOMErs who still love, use and contribute to the project.

It *is* a shame that the crasher you had reported got triaged after 5 months and you were asked for a stack trace 'when we could have got one, if we indeed cared'. Please do file the 'some eight to ten crashes' mentioned in your blog and see if we fare any better now.
And if you need a nudge to try Evolution again, check out some stats and the charts on Evolution 2.8 IMAP performance.
[gnome] [evolution]

The monkey is out

You can now download Evolution 2.7.91, Evolution-Data-Server 1.7.91 and GtkHTML-3.11.91. Here is an overview of what is new in this development series.

• Global search in Mailer and Quick Search defaults
• Wide Screen mode, Vertical Preview
• Cairo integration for better look and feel
• Faster Performance and reduced Memory footprints in Mail (IMAP and GW)
• Improved Load sequence for GW Calendar - now loads 10 times faster
• Reduced EDS memory footprint - separate cache for Tasks/Calendar/Memos,
• reduced static linkages and loads of leak fixes in Contacts and Calendar
• Support for GW Reminder Notes and Mail retract
• Sharable Notes in the Journal (filesystem).
• Allow dynamic linking to libdb
• gnome-keyring support

Stay tuned for the cool charts and hard numbers.
In the meanwhile, you can help us make this release even better by filing bug reports and contributing patches.

Ten On Ten

Wow! The SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 scores a Ten On Ten.

GUADEC archives

Bad, I had to miss the action at GUADEC this year. Got to view the 'How much faster' and 'Taming the Beast' slides. Still waiting for the Archives to be up. Anyone , please ?

Just Moved In !

I have moved to Blogger.com as my blog on gnome.org was blown away by a spam attack a couple of months ago. Picked up the auto-response ticket ID and waited long but then there is one post that I really want to respond to - so here I am.

Thom : Evolution did an overhaul of its menus and shortcuts to be more HIG-friendly in Evolution 2.6 and we are constantly incorporating most of the feedback we receive through bugzilla and Better Desktop.
Evolution HEAD already supports a vertical preview pane - and the current development release is working towards configurable toolbars and even better searching.

We are listening here and in the Bugzilla.
[gnome] [evolution]