Evolution 2.02

I've been trying various mail and calendar programs in Linux and haven't been 100% satisfied with what I have found. I settled with Mozilla's Thunderbird for mail, but I've never cared about it having to pause the whole program to play a sound file and the junk filter doesn't seem to be as good as it used to be. The calendar programs I have tried either wouldn't play an assigned sound file or wouldn't give me a reminder of an event, despite configuring the event to give me one. I was hoping that Evolution would solve both problems for me.

Mail wise, Evolution doesn't really impress me. Evolution's import option could not find the mail I have in Thunderbird, nor would it let me give it a directory to get the mail from (Correction: You only can't do this if you try to import data and settings from another program. Importing from a single file allows you to choose a directory in file, though I would have to do it multiple times for each mail account I have, and it may be messy). Also, I've gotten use to having separate inboxes for each of my mail accounts, but Evolution forces me to use one inbox, create folders in that inbox, and filter my mail into those folders. But I could deal with that if their new junk mail filtering system worked better than Thunderbird's. Alas, it wasn't to be. Despite the good amount and mixture of spam and non-spam mail I get, Evolution just didn't want to identify spam at all. Maybe I missed something that I had to do to get it working, but the options showed nothing obvious that I hadn't enabled that looked like it dealt with junk mail. Still, I would expect it to be as easy to set up as Thunderbird.

With the calendar, though, Evolution did everything I want a calendar program to do. It gave me reminders when I told it to and played the sound file I assigned for it. Because of that, I'll use Evolution for it's calendar, but completely avoid it for mail. I'll probably try doing two layers of spam filtering - one at the Thunderbird level and before that, one with some other spam filtering program like spambayes. No matter what I end up doing, I will be sure to report my results here.