After many years as a dedicated user of Thunderbird as a mail and news client, along with the Lightning add-on for calendar and tasks, my list of gripes suddenly reached breaking point this week. I won’t go through them all, but here’s a small selection:
- Resource hoggery – this seems to be woven into the fabric of all things Mozilla, and was responsible for me ditching Firefox for Chromium earlier this year. I know the response to this because I’ve heard it a million times – computers are getting faster, RAM is cheap. Well maybe, but I want to use my resources, they’re not yours to waste.
- Thunderbird is a second class citizen. That’s my perception anyway. Mozilla is about web browsers and Thunderbird is dragged along and supported grudgingly. “But why would anyone want to use native clients for anything when they could access everything via a browser?” is what I keep hearing. I think that’s ridiculous and will always be wrong, but there you go.
- Lightning is a third class citizen. It’s just another Thunderbird add-on, who cares? Again, just my perception, and no offence meant to the tiny and under-appreciated team who do excellent work on it.
- I receive a meeting invitation, I accept it into a calendar, the response is sent via a different email address to the one that was invited.
- The address book doesn’t sync with anything, e.g. CardDAV, WebDAV. That’s just insane, it’s nearly 2012. Oh, there are various third party add-ons, which I have used in the past, but due to version inflation or something, they are only occasionally compatible.
Anyway, that list could go on forever. I didn’t set out to disparage Thunderbird or Mozilla. Thunderbird is good, just not for me any more. So let’s move on to the replacement.
Evolution is what’s taken the place of Thunderbird for me. I had a number of reservations about this, but so far it’s turned out to be excellent. All the problems I had with Thunderbird have gone away, right down to it using A FIFTH of the memory to do the same job faster than its bloated predecessor.
The migration wasn’t entirely trouble-free though. One of the biggest problems was that I tried to set it up to use real Trash and Junk folders for IMAP accounts. This is wrong, and not how IMAP is supposed to work, but everyone does it anyway. However, that functionality in Evolution just doesn’t work properly and you end up with messages you delete or move reappearing, and all kinds of other strange goings on. The answer is simply to just not do that, and let Evolution work with its own ‘virtual’ versions of these folders, while using IMAP properly in the background.
Only time will tell if this was really a good move, but so far I’m very happy with it.
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Well I hope it works for you, as I have moved the other way. Evolution for me was slow and rendered slow. Thunderbird appears to be quicker for me, but I do not have any addons installed yet. So time will tell if it was the right move.
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Dito. Sorry to say but I predict your gripes wont go away at all, just be shifted a little. Evolution also does answer to meeting invitations only with the Mail Addess marked as default. If that does not happen to be the invited one, though luck for you. The NNTP client is a sad, sad story and essentially a bag full of bugs. After 7+ years of constant use, the local search has stopped to work for me completely, it always returns an empty result instantly. It is a memory hog like I’ve never seen one before, especially if you dare to try using dynamic folders (search folders). But that actually has become a low pri issue for me over the years, since RAM has become so unbelievably cheap and fast nowadays.
The calendar sometimes works and sometimes doesnt. CalDAV makes it crash VERY often. When you upgrade from Evo2.x to 3.x you often end up with a virtually unusable result.
There are broken local calendars that can NOT be deleted but inhibit you from accepting any meeting invitation with an error if you try to do so. This is because the local URI *and* URI formats changed but Evo does not always upgrade its own config correctly during update. This is extremely hard to fix manually, other than by wiping everything and starting over from scratch. Also, during the Upgrade, custom mail folder URIs (e.g. for sent mail folder etc) are not upgraded und you end up with having to fix them all manually for every singe account in your config. Very often, the evolution data daemon will crash on you in the background, freeze everything and drive you crazy while you need to get that super urgent business mail sent – until you find out that there is a “killev” command hidden somewhere outside the usual command paths (use locate to find it) – and you’ll find yourself using it at least twice a day. When moving mails with attachments from local to imap folders, prepare to end up with crippled attachments. Actually, the mails still are fine on the server, but in your local cache the MIME format breaks on the move and evolution has no means to force a rebuild (which is a pain with big folders anyway).These are just some of the more prominent annoyances you will encounter. Good luck.
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I’d like to add that I reported DOZENS of bugs for evolution over the years, some of them being strikingly obvious and easy to fix. Almost none of them never got a fix, some not even a single answer. I don’t expect the situation to improve, now that Evolution has been kicked off Ubuntu by Canonical, a move thats probably sided by an according HR drain.
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my imap trash folder is not in the primary directory of my imap account. It is in a subfolder named “mail”. Now if I set user_pref(“mail.server.server3.trash_folder_name”, “mail/Trash”); in user.js, I do not see a Trash folder at all in TB. What should I do to set this mail/Trash as my Trash folder?
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