[ale] evolution dropping email

[Leam Hall]

On 12/31/2011 08:31 AM, Mike Harrison wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Dec 2011, Leam Hall wrote:
>
>> Tim,
>>
>> My frustration comes from one big incident. Evolution started to close
>> up but didn't have enough disk space so instead of a smart bail I lost a
>> good bit of e-mail. I just pulled it from every machine I had and
>> haven't looked back.
>
> I'm using evolution for my work-related google hosted mail,
> which works... but I'd like to find a better client, especially
> one that deals with the normal business world Outlook users
> email insanity better.
>
> What did you change to?
>
> (I'm using Pine still for my personal stuff.. and as backup interface
>    to work/gmail when all I can do is SSH out from a clients site..)
>

Mike,

I use Thunderbird for mostly non-technical reasons. I'll share the logic 
on the off chance that someone else cares. If not, consider it a 
negative example.  :)

I used to use Mutt and procmail but kept getting so many mails that I 
could not read that a more graphical client was needed. While my Linux 
friends did text, the rest of the world likes pretty images and I got 
tired of having to save the files and open them in something else. Hence 
the original move to Evolution.

While I'm a Red Hat sort of guy I really dislike the cesspool that is 
inter-RPM dependencies. This needs that, you have to have perl to 
install PHP on a web server, etc. Nauseating, if you like efficiency. 
Evolution was one such offender both in the giving and receiving of 
dependencies.

After some time I realized that all of my hardware is old and well past 
the MTBF point on most of the critical components. I also had to think 
through what is really important to me. Staying current in the field is, 
storing old dusty hardware (1) on the chance it might be used is not. 
Since I use Firefox as a browser I chose Thunderbird as the mail client. 
Distro portable and a large community behind it.

I feel strongly that there is more work for me in helping solve business 
problems than in flipping bits for a living. So I use tools that 
non-hackers can use and I'm fixing to push myself into the cloud so I 
can talk to customers about it. I solve business problems for a living 
and my background is playing with Linux at home and at work for almost 
two decades.

So my criteria  was an open source graphical client that non-Linux geeks 
can use and wasn't a fringe product. Thunderbird fit that bill.

Make sense?

Leam

(1) We'll ignore the fact that my main personal machine is an IBM T-30 
that struggles to keep up with the Fedora 14 it's running.