Over the past few months, I've slowly come to the realization that maybe Evolution isn't the ideal tool for my purposes. Perhaps someone here can convince me otherwise by pointing out what I'm doing wrong.
When I first looked at the features for Evolution, I thought this single email and calendaring application would be the first to satisfy all my needs. But as time went on, I found some frustrating issues that prevented me from improving my productivity. In fact, I find myself angrily frustrated most of the time. First the good things: I've NEVER had any stability problems with Evolution, and for this I'm grateful. I've never come across any of the issues described by others on this mailing list, despite (or because of?) the fact that I run Evolution with Window Maker in Slackware 8.x and have never touched Red Carpet or RPM packages (unsupported distro, unsupported DE, unsupported Slackware package format). Even Evolution 1.0.7 has been super-reliable for stability, so kudos to that! The VFolders feature is totally awesome. It allows me to view only orders for specific products without having to sort them all into a seperate real folder, and this is a huge bonus. I wish I could find a similar feature on another client. But this is where the awesomeness ends and the problems begin. I've never been able to compile the CVS version of Evolution, and perhaps all those features I really need are only available there right now. I receive an average of 550 emails per day. Many of these are email summaries and receipts of orders placed through the online store I work for. The rest are either customer emails asking for tech support or customer service, or private emails. This is all done over 3 seperate accounts. I need to be able to cross-reference all of the emails to do my job quickly and efficiently. I also need to be able to manage my tasks quickly and efficiently. I have a terrible memory, and it's very hard to keep up with all the items that come up everyday, so a good task management/calendar app is essential. And the vast majority of my tasks happen on the web (store backends), so I need to be able to take information from my emails and into the browser without having to type everything in manually. For years now I've been looking for the ideal environment to get all this done efficiently. Everytime I try something new, I always find myself wandering back to Mozilla, which is unfortunate... kinda like settling for the lesser evil. No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to ever be able to copy and paste things out of displayed emails in evolution (what some people call the "preview pane"). I've tried everything I could think of, but it never works. Shift-Delete, Ctrl-C, even Edit/Copy from the menu. None of it ever manages to copy anything. The only way I can ever get it to copy or cut text is if I hit Reply and copy the text out of the email editor. This is a HUGE drawback when I'm doing order tracking and need to quickly copy UPS tracking numbers into a spreadsheet or the browser. There's no way I'm gonna type hundreds of tracking numbers by hand everyday. And having to hit Reply to every email before I can copy text out of it is a pain. This has plagued me ever since the first 1.0 release of Evolution. What am I doing wrong? Am I the only one with this problem? Another issue is the fact that I can't get the cc and Reply-to to auto-fill with default values. I need this for almost every email I send out. Remembering to do it manually for each and every email is not only a chore, it's error-prone. I find myself forgetting too often. I've brought this up before and was told the CVS version had this feature, but as I mentioned above, I never got the CVS version to compile. Along those same lines, I can never get Evolution to send from the right account. Once email has been received and filtered, it no longer seems to belong to any specific account, despite the fact that it's stored in seperate mail files on the hard drive. So when I reply to it, it's anyone's guess as to which account it'll be sent from. If my email address was in the To: of the original email, then it "usually" gets sent from that account, but that's not nearly good enough. Most of the email I receive isn't addressed to me, it's addressed to the company's customer service address. I can't be replying to customers using my personal account, nor do I want to be doing my private emailing from my corporate account. I realize that changing the From: account is a simple task, but I find myself forgetting to do it regularly and that's when trouble begins. Ideally, the cc: and Reply-to: should auto-fill differently based on which account the email is being sent from. Now THAT would be awesome. This and a few other issues have rendered Evolution unuseable for my corporate emailing. Not because of any major design flaws or bugs, but because Mozilla mail does most of these things properly. There's simply no reason to have to put up with these issues if I can find those features elsewhere. I've brought most of this up before, hoping that someone might be able to help me fix the problems. But at this point I'm at my wit's end. No matter how hard I try, Evolution just doesn't do what I need it to. This is really unfortunate because the calendar/task scheduling part of Evolution is exactly what I've been looking for to manage my tasks and appointments. But it seems like a waste to run Evolution just for the calendar. Here's hoping that all these issues will disapear and Evolution becomes the ultimate emailing and scheduling suite! In the meantime, can someone please recomend an email and scheduling app that might fit my needs? I don't care if they're two seperate programs, as long as they work well and allow me to be more productive. Mozilla (even 1.0) is still too unstable and often crashes or locks up on me, or has other erratic behaviour. It's also too slow on my archaic Celeron 600. And the beta calendar app for Mozilla refuses to run on my computer. Thanks, Frank Gore _______________________________________________ evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution
