[Evolution] Help me switch to evolution

[Ben Davis]

Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:

>On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 14:18 -0400, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
>  
>
>>On Wed, 2005-03-16 at 11:09 -0600, Ben Davis wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>I'm currently using Thunderbird/Sunbird as my PIM managers, and I'm 
>>>wanting to switch to Evolution because of its tight integration with the 
>>>desktop.  However,  there are several things that are keeping me from 
>>>switching at this point, and I was hoping someone might be able to 
>>>provide some workarounds, solutions, or perhaps just suggest to me a 
>>>different way of doing things.
>>>
>>>1.  IMAP seems VERY slow compared to Tbird.  Sometimes when I switch 
>>>from one account to another, I have to wait while it re-loads my entire 
>>>inbox...   Are there any options I can change to help speed things up?
>>>      
>>>
>>Evo is also doing a lot of local indexing, but I agree it seems
>>noticeably slower than TBird for IMAP access. It's also a *lot* more
>>brittle (quite frequently hangs while fetching mail for no obvious
>>reason) though recent versions are improving.
>>    
>>
>
>unfortunately, the problem is that our query to fetch summary info (info
>used to populate the message-list) is a lot less efficient because it
>queries for oodles more data than mozilla's (why? because users demand
>more functionality - like mailing-list filtering/vfoldering, attachment
>icons, etc which mean we have to query for the entire message header
>than than just a few bits and pieces of it)
>
>so sadly, this is unlikely to improve much.
>
At least that explains it.  The thing that I think can be improved on, 
or better revised, Is allowing the user to do more while other stuff 
goes on the background.

For instance,  sometimes I'll bring up Evo to check an older email,  but 
it makes me wait until it fetches new emails and does all that other 
magic stuff before I can even access my folders and existing messages. 
Sometimes I'm left waiting for up to a minute.

Is there a reason for this?  In Thunderbird,  it seems like its first 
priority is to let you read your email and do things with it (even move 
messages around, etc) even while other stuff is going on elsewhere.  I 
feel that if Evolution was refined more in this aspect, the slowness 
problem, while unchanged, would have a lesser _effect_ on the user.