Evolution pains

[Matthew Davidson]

Hello,

I'm having a bit of a whinge, because it's a rainy Friday afternoon, and
I don't feel like working.  So don't read this unless you feel like
thanklessly trying to help out a sour old malcontent, or are in the mood
to add your own whine.  

I'm really disappointed with Evolution, and would be going back to
Thunderbird if it wasn't for better IMAP support in Evolution.  Here are
a selection of irritations:

Multiple addresses in "To:" field. Several times I've pasted a (long)
list of email addresses into the "To:" field, only to find some time
later that the email was only sent to the first of these addresses.
It's just occurred to me that perhaps I hadn't put commas in between the
addresses, but who would assume spaces don't indicate a word boundary in
a list of email addresses?

No apparent way to disable HTML email rendering.  I can see where you
can disable the loading of images, but no way to actually disable HTML
rendering altogether.  I waste a lot of breath telling people to never,
ever, read their email in anything but plain text, but the default email
client on the system I'm installing for my customers has no way to do
that.  There may not currently be any security holes in libgtkhtml,
certainly not as many doozies as in IE, but it's not inconceivable, and
I don't want to read my email in anything but plain text, anyway.

Weird composing quirks, especially when pasting from formatted text.
Evolution seems to employ some sort of peculiar text box formatting
model.  When trying to place the cursor inside one of these boxes, the
cursor often leaps back to the very top of the email. I never use word
processors, so I can't imagine how this would be considered helpful or
intuitive behaviour, but perhaps others can.  It's infuriatingly like
one of those practical joke TSR programs you used to get for Windows
3.1.

Spam filtering doesn't work, at least not with the ease one would expect
from something that has spam-related buttons in the toolbar.  I know
that's been covered in a previous thread, but I just wanted to add my
"me too".

Perennial POP3 Error.  Every time one of my POP3 mailboxes is checked I
get an irritating "Error while Fetching Mail. Cannot get POP summary:
Operation now in progress." error.  I've googled on this, and the only
advice I've found is to disable POP3 extensions, which makes no
difference.

I can live with all of these, but I've been surprised by how few, and
how insignificant, irritations have to be before many users will throw
up their hands in despair and go back to Outlook Express (and tell
everybody else in town how their life was hell from the moment they let
me install something called "You-beaut-two" on their PC).

Matthew. 

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