Evolution again as default email app/client

Thank you everybody for your comments!
I use Thunderbird and Evolution at the same time, one for work the other for private communication. Both work for me but I have found Evolution more helpful, especially the addressbook is more powerful (e.g. categories, more phone numbers, email address fields if needed, birthday & anniversary are recognised by the Ubuntu system and a notification is shown on the actual day and the addressbook does not open as an extra window).
Evolution has progressed slowly but steadily and has some nifty and helpful features. Yes, it does not look modern but it does not look ugly.
It also integrates Exchange/EWS quite well.
Overall Evolution seems to integrate better with Ubuntu than Thunderbird, e.g. new mail icon and display number of unread mails on the icon in Ubuntu Dock (an issue for a while). Some people are working on an add-on but a recent comment surprised me:“I think Windows already had a “new mail indicator”. They just fixed it so that Thunderbird would go to the indicator when you close it I think… But since TB does not have a Linux indicator… Ahahah ! Mozilla devs just hate Linux.”
https://github.com/Ximi1970/FireTray/issues/47#issuecomment-618706074
Not sure if it is true that Mozilla devs favour other OS but it seems Linux support is less than Windows support.

2 Likes

If Evolution is the default email client in Ubuntu again, it may get more attention, feedback, support and development.

2 Likes

And there some other minor but annoying issues in Thunderbird, e.g. I have not found a good way yet that all the text in certain html email are readable when I am in dark mode/theme.

There a lot of people including students who are using Ubuntu since years now. Just like the UI, if we change the email client, I am sure many of them, including those who use Ubuntu in office will be surprised by the change.

Last day, I tried to use my local email in Geary. I got the imap and smtp settings but couldn’t make it work. But in Thunderbird, it adds in automatically if I give the ID and password.

It will be safe to say that a new email client could possibly break a lot of things.

2 Likes

Evolution is on life-support upstream. There is one Red Hat engineer (Milan Crha) keeping it alive and focus will ship to gnome-calender and Geary which are actively developed.

The code base is big and ancient and nobody is going to fund a rewrite.

3 Likes

I agree with that any email defaults have to work seamlessly with online accounts.

I personally use Evolution because it’s wayland native (I need wayland as I’m on a mixed dpi setup), it has both calendar and email, it’s well integrated with online accounts, it works really well with google accounts.

I’ve also come to depend on its ability to create virtual, search-based inboxes that can also mux emails from all your accounts (I haven’t been able to find a way to do this on either geary or thunderbird).

I try geary periodically and always find it to be too basic and too glitchy - stuff like accepting a google calendar event from an email breaks on a regular basis.

Thunderbird is good but I can’t see a way to stop it from downloading my entire mailboxes instead of restricting downloads to certain folders. It kills my /home partition. It uses an ancient mozilla base so wayland support is pretty bad on the current versions.

There doesn’t seem a way to invite people into calendar events from Gnome calendar. It doesn’t correctly parse events that come with conferencing options (like google calendar with a google meet).

4 Likes

I like Evolution — it’s similar enough to Outlook to feel comfortable, (which many have to use at their place of employment). The calendar integration with Google is excellent, and I use it for that feature alone and for the RSS extension. Yup RSS is still around.
It would be nice if its UI could get some love and look more modern, but other than that I prefer it over Thunderbird, which I’ve used often too.

My $.02 FWIW.

2 Likes

Be interesting how RedHat’s customer lineup likes that combination! I bet they won’t, enterprise customers are pretty conservative.

Advertisement : there IS a Thunderbird indicator, https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1505/new-mail-indicator . :wink: A very simple one, though.

I used Evolution for a loooong time. I liked its Gnome integration. I was somewhat fed up with some error messages during mailboxes updates. Some issues with images pasting. Etc. And I didn’t like its one-man-team development (nothing personal, thanks to Milan for all his work).

I switched to Thunderbird some time ago and, from my point of view, I’m more convinced, definitely. Lightning calendar + Gdata provider (not the void one from the Ubuntu repository…) do very well the job to manage my Google calendar. E.g. : when I set up my Google account in gdata provider extension, ALL the Google calendars (Google main one + imported calendars in Google account) are shown. Through e-d-s, only the Google calendar is shown.

I tried Geary but it’s a work in progress, e.g. signatures, and it’s focused on simplicity. Gnome Calendar is, by far, the application I used for some long time which does segfault the most. I tried it very very recently and again, I get at least a random crash by session, some colors not applied, etc. Some time ago, it maked me mad because of the one-day shift bug (solved now). It’s nicely designed, though imho it misses multi-weeks view.

if it is already on life-support you never know when they might pull the plug, so to speak.
precisely one more reason for me not to use evolution.

the biggest u.s.p. of thunderbird is that it is cross platform…lin, mac & win.
beat that evolution & geary.

1 Like

@ipv and @jyaku It would be sad if Evolution is on life-support. What is your source of information?

i think you missed the IF in my post :

& i am quoting @jyaku so your question would get a better answer from him.

@ipv Thank you for the clarification!
@jyaku Could you help us with more details about the source of information regarding Evolution’s support level?

1 Like

@jyaku I would really be interested to hear more details and also about the source of information regarding Evolution’s support and development level.

Milan, the developer of Evolution, recently wrote that he “just committed a giant
change in the Evolution’s mail composer code, a rewrite to use
JavaScriptCore API instead of the deprecated (since WebKitGTK 2.22) C
DOM API.”
It looks like there is still active development of this versatile email app. Its mailing list is also actively used by long time and new users. And as others mentioned Evolution has some advantages over Geary and Thunderbird.

3 Likes

Ubuntu MATE switches from Thunderbird to Evolution!
“This release [Ubuntu MATE 20.04] also replaces Thunderbird with the Evolution email client. While Thunderbird is a quite popular desktop email client, Evolution integrates better with the MATE desktop and proves to be more useful.”
https://itsfoss.com/ubuntu-mate-20-04-review/
I can second the reasoning. Hopefully the main Ubuntu distribution can follow.

4 Likes

Thunderbird is also absolutely ancient. The UI has barely changed since the 1990’s.

A good email client is Blue Mail.

Been having second thoughts about third party email clients after reading about this debacle:

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/16/edison-mail-sync-bug/

I downloaded something from the Ubuntu store called Unofficial Webapp Office which is basically web access to Outlook in a dedicated browser window. Seems safer than trusting some indie app developer.

Unfortunately we have not heard from @jyaku for two months.

In the meantime another reason to switch to Evolution has been persisting for 2 years:
Bugzilla: Thunderbird needs a persistent “new mail” indicator on Linux (notification)

No that’s not a reason:
1- simply switch to native persistent-as-you-want TB notification via advanced settings, key mail.biff.use_system_alert
or
2- keep GNOME notifications and install https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1505/new-mail-indicator/