[PLUG] Evolution 1.2

[Brent Rieck]

On Sun, 2002-11-17 at 00:53, AthlonRob wrote:
> Now we run in to problems.  I open up the PLUG VFolder, click on a
> message up at the top, and hit 'n' for 'next unread message'.  Ooops, no
> dice.  I hunted around for several minutes - I think that keybinding and
> event have just vanished.  Bummer.

It's still there, just bound to odd keys  ("[", "]", "," and ".") -
which I'm sure seemed like good a idea at the time but nobody now seems
to like them.  You can change them by editing the
evolution-mail-message.xml file that's (probably) located in
/usr/share/gnome/ui.  Changing the 'accel=' will change the key binding

    <cmd name="MailNextUnread"
     _tip="Display the next unread message"
     accel="n"/>

    <cmd name="MailPreviousUnread"
     _tip="Display the previous unread message"
     accel="p"/>

Poke around and you'll probably see some other things you might like to
bind keys to or change the binding of and how to name the keystroke. 
You may want to make a backup before you tweak the file, and you'll have
to stop and restart evolution before the changes get picked up; I don't
know what will happen if you bind two commands to the same key.  Also
make a backup of your changes, an Evolution upgrade will probably
overwrite it.  I wish this was configurable in the application..

> The shortcuts on the side seem to also have problems updating - new mail
> came in (3 plug messages) but Inbox's count didn't go up - PLUG's did. 
> I have yet to see if the 'Unmatched' count works properly or not (it
> didn't update with 1.0.8 unless I was viewing the unmatched folder when
> the mail came in).

I've not noticed this - do you mean on the "Shortcut" bar or in the
"Folders" bar?  Shortcuts in the shortcut bar have never shown
new/unread/read message counters for me, but the folder list does.  You 
did mentioned that you stuff your PLUG messages into a VFolder, which
I've noticed "broken" behavior from (not updating sometimes as new mail
flows in).  I filter my incoming mail into mailboxes organized into
folders and subfolders and haven't noticed new message counts being off.

I've never really used VFolders except as a way to search across
mailboxes and to have persistent searches in place - do the messages get
hidden from your Inbox?

> But if you store a lot of email in ev, you'll find a much much snappier
> system.  I have about 5300 emails in my inbox and definitely noticed a
> big improvement.  I'm sure those of you with years' worth of email will
> find an even bigger jump in speed.  :-)

Evo 1.2 has a HUGE speed improvement over 1.0.8 for large mailboxes!
Overall startup times went from about 2 minutes to a couple seconds for
me.  Opening a large mailbox went from a few seconds to about 1 second. 
Performing multiple operations at once like deleting hundreds of
messages while opening another mailbox and reading a message is now
feasible whereas before it would seem to wait for all the messages to be
deleted before loading the other mailbox's message to read.  Filtering
is much faster too, which is probably related to the faster mailbox
handling. 

> That about sums it up.  I'd wait for another release - hopefully with a
> fixed 'n' key.  :-)

I wouldn't wait if one is looking for a new mail program and Evolution
has the features you need - it's a very nice program I think.

The things I like:

 - If you're a packrat like I am and subscribe to dozens of mailing
   lists it's very nice (though not perfect) for managing thousands of
   messages. I've got about 29,000 messages in it now and it's far
   better to use than anything else I've used (pine, mutt, outlook,
   eudora (older versions only, recent ones might be better)).

 - Filtering is very easy and quite powerful - 97% of procmail's
   capability at about %3 of procmail's effort.

 - The built-in mail editor is pretty nice - features like inline spell
   checking and some handy text formatting features (but not enough)

 - It's reliable (at least for me, some people have had other
   experiences), I often leave it running for weeks at a time with no
   problems.  On the rare occasions when it as crashed it's not lost any
   mail, even messages in the process of being composed.  YMMV of
   course.

The things I don't like:

 - About once a day I wish it had was a way to easily search across
   folders.

 - I wish it had a better text editor with a richer set of text
   formatting features.

The things that would be nice to have:

 - A text-only mode

--Brent