Few simple questions on Evolution

[CB]

Although I generally use thunderbird and mutt for my mail, I've been
trying to get to like Evolution. Apart from it's IMAP slowness (compared
to mutt & thunderbird), there are a couple of little niggles that I'd be
interested to know if there are workarounds for:

- ridiculously big toolbar icons. Is there any way of reducing these? I
know ctrl-Shift-O hides the toolbar altogether, but can I just make it
smaller?

- apparently no sticky settings for hiding read messages in folders. It
drives me nuts that to have to go 'View->Hide Read Messages' now and
again to re-apply the 'hide read' view. 

- the 'normal' header display takes up an extreme amount of space
(compared to, for example, the very neat display when you collapse the
headers in thunderbird). Is there any way of reducing this?