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Evolution 2.24: The buggiest version ever

Almost two weeks earlier than the official release (I’m so brave!), I upgraded my Ubuntu Box from Hardy to Intrepid. Everything shines and it is great, except for one: Evolution 2.24.

The new version of famous Gnome PIM Client by Novell (ex Ximian) is absolutely a pain in the ass, buggy and very easy to crash (it seems a software by Microsoft!). Let’s start.

Google Calendar

At the very first beginning it seems this new version eventually works well with Google Calendar. If you add an event on your Evolution, you will see it magically appears online. But at the very second try you will understand it is not working so well. Events in some of the calendar are read only and any time you try to move them or to modify you have two possibilities:

1. The event doesn’t move: it’s well protected and the cut and copy commands in the context menu are gray.
2. The event moves, you start singing “hurrah!”, but it actually makes a duplicate creating a new event just beside the previous one.

Of course forget any chance of deleting any event: any changes must be done through the web interface of Google Calendar.

After that you could have the great idea of changing some settings for the calendar which gives you problems. The default settings are “sync every 30 minutes” and “use SSL”. Well, let’s try to make the sync happens every 5 minutes and do you really need SSL for the calendar about your dog poo time?

After changing those settings somethings seems changed, but it’s just an impression: give Evolution a couple of minutes and it will disappoint you again. So you open the settings again and you see that they are back to 30 minutes and SSL is activated again.

Mail

I have to admit: there are not so many problems about the email. Only two.

1. Email notification

I was used to run the Email Notification applet to make an envelop icon appear on my panel any time I have an unread email. I just don’t like the Evolution native notification: it doesn’t behave as I want, and until differently proven this computer belongs to me.

Of course, since you are reading this, the Mail Notification 5.4 doesn’t work well with Evolution 2.24. You could think this is just a matter of configuration. So I tried to configure the Mail Notification but as I try to change any settings inside the Mail Notification Preferences I see Evolution crashing. The big giant defeated by the small dwarf who, by the way, didn’t want to hurt the big giant.

2. Virtual Folders and email count

Evolution 2.24 has some serious problem with calculation. I have some VFolder: one of this is the “Unread Messages” that will collect all the messages tagged as unread. This folder says I have two unread messages but it’s actually empty.

But there is another VFolder which behaves much funnier. This folder collects all the messages received in the last two days plus all the email tagged as “Important”. This folder says that I have 6 messages total (they are actually 27) and -1 unread messages (yes: minus one). Maybe Evolution thinks I have to write one message to get even.

Evolution 2.24 has been released along with Gnome 2.24. Both are great projects and I’m using them since several years ago (I suppose I started using Gnome in 2000), but they cannot pretend they are good and stable only because they shouted out so. It’s some kind of arrogance that puts out a quality much lower than the one I got used to.

When Evolution freezes

As many of you could easily understand, I’m not talking about the human evolution, but about the PIM software Evolution.

It’s generally a good software, although I thing there is much space to improve, much more than what Evolution has done in the last few years.

Today a classic case has happened again. I started Evolution, and immediately clicked the Calendar button. Unfortunately I was too quick, and I pressed the holy button before Evolution had finished loading the mail component, which is the default component loaded at start.

What happened next? Evolution has frozen and trying to close its window made my computer ask whether I want to forcedly terminate the program. I had no choice and I killed it.

The problem is that Evolution doesn’t want to start again, unless I go and find the evolution-data-server process to kill it as well. If not, Evolution will actually launch (you can see the correspondent process in the system monitor, or in “top”) but will never appear, waiting for some God-only-knows event.

Actually it’s quite probable that the standard users don’t know about that: the only choice for them is to restart the computer, or at least end the session and login again. This is absolutely unacceptable: if you like to restart when things go wrong, you could just use Windows.

I hope this problem (along many others) have been solved in the 2.24 version (I’m using 2.22 which is included in Ubuntu Hardy). However, I don’t count on it. Let’s see a few weeks later, after upgrading to Intrepid.

Evolution 2.12 does not really love Gmail

The new version of Evolution included in the upcoming Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon has an annoying compatibility bug with Gmail. When you download your emails using POP and you interrupt the download before you got all the messages, Evolution will not show you the messages you have already downloaded, nor in the incoming folder, neither in any other folder.

The problem is that Gmail has its own way to mark the downloaded messages: while with a normal POP server the client is the only to remember which messages has been downloaded, the Google mail will mark any message is popped and will not propose it again next time you connect with your email client. So, since Evolution will not show you the messages you got during a pop session which has been stopped, and even it does know some messages need to be downloaded again, the only way to read those messages is to look for them in your Gmail Archive. Anyway, you can feel quite happy, because Gmail will not delete those messages. You only need to remember to check your archive on Gmail every time a download is stopped (e.g.. connections problem, your child saying “oh, what if I click here?”).

This bug has already been signaled to Launchpad.