Srini

I released Evolution 2.12 with GNOME 2.20. This is my first release as the maintainer for Evolution. Some interesting things we did for Evolution 2.12 follows

Spam Improvements

• New bogofilter spam plugin
• Spam plugins (bogofilter/spamassasin) can now learn ham
• Spams don’t initiate new mail notifications
• and…

UI Improvements

• Basic contact merging support.
• Improved search support for Calendar and Tasks

  • New advanced search and better quick search options

• Better printing support for mailer
• Magic space bar support - Read all the unread mails in all folders with just space bar key
• Message selection improvements
• More options for offline support
• New –disable-preview command line option to avoid repeated crash on last selected email
• Option for Outlook style signature on top - more details here
• Option for Outlook style reply header
• Spinner in the status bar
• Support for multimedia keys
• Support for showing contact photos in preview pane
• Thread sorting based on the date of the latest message

Performance Improvements

• Addressbook improvements from DBus port branch
• EContact/VCard folding optimizations
• Huge Exchange folder loading optimizations

New Plugins

• Bogofilter spam plugin
• Attachment reminder plugin

• Mail notification plugin

• TNEF attachment plugins (Experimental)
• Revamped backup/restore plugin

Lots of Exchange/GroupWise performance/stability fixes went in 2.12 release. We had a special focus on stability in 2.12 cycle and Evolution has nearly 100 crashers fixed and in total 450 bugs were fixed during the 2.12 cycle. Now we are preparing a planning page for the next cycle here. Feel free to add your thoughts to the planning page.

Thanks a lot for the contributors and we are looking forward for the next release.

Evolution’s goals (camel) are definitely different from Tinymail’s goal (camel-lite). You definitely can’t substitute each other in all places. Users wont be happy to use a email client that doesn’t even support message threading on a desktop. Philip posted an overview camel-lite onto the evolution-hackers list some time back. Camel-lite has a lot of things that can be merged with upstream camel like pop summary, some IMAP improvements (non-hacky stuffs). I’m sure that the discussion is ON between Varadhan and Philip to get the pop summary into trunk for early 2.14 cycle and more merging of useful things down the time. But I won’t / don’t think Evolution would move away from camel to camel-lite any time.

Update: I just saw that Sankar (who maintains EPlugins) has posted a nice blog about Evolution/Camel/Camel-lite. Though I don’t agree to all the points, some interesting differences and goals.

It is really nice to be at GUADEC and see the ever busy GNOME hackers

I had my talk first in the morning. Guenther saved me from my Magic Spacebar demo failure. (Caret mode was ON) It went pretty good otherwise. Unfortunately there was no recording as I have heard before.

I had a nice chat with the audience after the talk. Nice to see the Evolution hackers from China.

Lucian is doing a Evolution plugin for feeds with RSS, RDF and ATOM support. He just made 0.4 release.

Check out his site for more.

Wondering what is this all about? Varadhan has posted an excellent blog about his optimization work for the Exchange Connector. Read his post for the complete information.

You don’t see the graph for/with the patch. Yeah it is so difficult to paint microseconds in the graph

Milan Crha and Øystein Gisnås are doing an awesome patch for Evolution/EDS which improves add / get contact apis from 37 seconds to 0.15 second. This is gonna rock performance of contacts with images. Great work guys!

Evolution got 3 Google summer of code projects.

     Google Calendar backend for EDS/Evolution
      by Ebby Wiselyn, mentored by Harish Krishnaswamy
     Evolution Message Threading Improvements
      by Tobias Mueller, mentored by Sven Herzberg
     Evolution/Seahorse Integration
     by Pınar Yanardağ, mentored by Raphael Slinckx

A BIG thanks to all the mentors and students and all the very best to Ebby, Tobias Mueller and Pınar Yanardağ.

behdad, I guess, dobey’s comments explains the feature. IIRC OpenOffice.org, Firefox too has the same concept like evolution. IMO It may not be fair to compare this with tabs in gedit. I agree with the shortcuts stuff, which should to be addressed in some way. We are working on configurable shortcuts which should help address such issues. It was supposed to be in 2.8, but didnt make it. It should be part of next release, as I have described in the FUTURE section in my earlier blog

- HIG states, dont change the tool button labels. That is one reason, why “Delete” / “Undelete” and “Junk” / “Not Junk” cant be merged.
There was some proposal to make spam assasin learn as ham (Not a spam). Both Junk and Not_Junk button has to be present for that. Atleast It was merged in early 2.14 cycle and reverted for above reasons.

- “Delete” option in context menu for a deleted message was a due to bug 254770 You can reopen and put down your views there

- I strongly agree to the jumping message selection in threaded view. Please file a bug, and put down your expectation, we would be happy to fix it.

One big reason, I hate to use threading is that my reading is limited to the mails I received TODAY/RECENTLY. If a new message arrives in a old thread, it still lies way below the scrolled window and never comes to my visibility. I really like GMail at this very point and I tried to get something like this into Evolution, to improve threading usage. I got some good results.

If the message is in a collapsed state, the date of the THREAD, I compute to be the date of latest message received in that thread.

which brings the message on to the top to get the attention. If you expand, it appears like this.

If the message is in expanded state during sorting (List generation), then it takes the date of its creation, which puts it back to the original place.

Once in a day, I can use View/Collapse All and see are there any new messages to a old thread.