The (d)evolution of Evolution

[Joe Klemmer]

Synopsis:
         Evolution hangs for 5 minutes or more when connecting to an IMAP
server, thus rendering email reading impossible.  This happens with all
IMAP servers.  The hanging "feature" does not exist under Thunderbird.
Does anyone know what causes this and, more importantly, how to fix it?

Rant:
         I have been using Evolution for my email for quite a while now. 
  It always seemed to me that every version increase would lose some 
feature or function that was great.  Over all it keeps getting worse and 
worse as the versions go up.  Now FC3 ships with Evolution 2.  The UI 
changes are really bad.  The problem is that it's trying to look and act 
more and more like Outlook.  Outlook just plain SUCKS!  Outlook wasn't 
good when times were good.  However, I have been sticking with Evolution
because it has, by far, the best spell checking of any application I've
ever used.  And my English spelling is really that bad as to need this.
So all in all it's been ok.

         There has always been one small problem with it that's now 
become insurmountable.  Every time Evolution connects to the IMAP server 
the app will hang.  It'll sit there unmoving and unresponsive until it's
done talking to the server.  As the version numbers have been going up
the length of this hang-while-talking has increased.  I can only guess
that this is also part of the Outlook cloning process.

         Yesterday I got completely fed up and gave Thunderbird a shot. 
  While it has some issues with functionality (not lack of, just 
different) there is absolutely no hanging or waiting with it.  None at 
all.  I am not forced to wait up to the 5 minutes it now takes for 
Evolution to finish doing whatever it's doing and allow me to read 
email.  What would to take hours with Evolution takes minutes with 
T-bird.  I'm not exaggerating.

         So now I have a dilemma...  If I switch to T-bird I will lose 
my spell checking and also my address list.  Oh, BTW, the utility 
evolution-addressbook-export that comes with FC3 does not work at all 
for CSV format.  When I try it I get a funky binary output file full of 
0x0A characters.  Right now it seems to me that the balance point has 
finally shifted, though.  I need to be able to read my email and if that 
means switching to T-bird and redoing my address list by hand and 
sacrificing a little spell checking then it's worth it.

         But I'll make one last attempt to see if I can get Evolution in 
a usable state.  Does anyone out there know how to fix this problem?

-- 
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