Evolution 2.12 released

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…

Junk options

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

Attachment reminder

  • Mail notification plugin

Mail notification

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

Restore

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.

28 thoughts on “Evolution 2.12 released”

  1. Thank you very much for such a rocking release. It’s totally awesome!
    One question 🙂
    Do you plan to merge the dbus-branch in 2.14, to get rid of bonobo?

  2. Now it would be nice if you could fix up the icons. Many non-tango icons seems awfully out of place and makes the app look less professional.

    Cheers,

  3. I’m using Evo 2.12 right now and it has really improved since the last stable version. But there are nontheless some issues I have with it:
    – It’s a pity that the “Attachment reminder” plugin is not translatable
    – The plugins are a mess. Why should I as a user have to decided whether I’d like to disable or enable *basic* features? I understand that there may be reasons to split up basic application logic in plugins to easy maintainers’ lifes, but please don’t bother me with this details. At the moment I don’t know if I should go to the Preferences, to the Plugin Options or to *both* dialog if I’d like to enable or disable a feature.

  4. bjoern,
    Ross Burton (DBus branch author) is now the Addressbook maintainer and we were supposed to have it in 2.12 and some issues are delaying them for 2.14 and Im sure that we should have that merged.

    Kenneth Rohde Christainsen , Can you file a bug about your observation and CC me in that? (sragavan at novell dot com)

    hendi , For the attachment reminder issue, we are aware of it. But for now, the localized text can be added part of the plugin configuration and it detects that too. For plugins vs core features we are aware of the ambiguity, Im not sure when we gonna take this up, but Im sure that we should address it soon.

    Michael R. Head, Thanks for your observation. I will update it.

    And a BIG thanks for all the encouraging comments.

  5. I’d really like to use evolution, I especially love that searching emails, happens in an instance compared to all other mail-progs. However one thing that still keeps me from using it is, that there is no external editor support for evolution. I do all my writing in vim and I only have to revert to using the (a lot less powerful) evolution editor when writing emails. I’ve seen that there has been a patch since 2002 but it has never been merged is there a reason? Hope this changes in the future, evo would be a clearly great mail client then.

  6. I’d really like to use evolution, I especially love that searching emails happens in an instance compared to all other mail-progs. However one thing that still keeps me from using it is, that there is no external editor support for evolution. I do all my writing in vim and I only have to revert to using the (a lot less powerful) evolution editor when writing emails. I’ve seen that there has been a patch since 2002 but it has never been merged is there a reason? Hope this changes in the future, evo would be a clearly great mail client then.

  7. OK second try. I really like evolution but the feature I’m really missing is external editor support. I saw that there’s been an open bug and a patch forever, but it never has been integrated. Will this happen?

  8. Jochen, I dont have a time frame for this to happen. But multiple editors support is something that I liked and wanted to do. If there is a working patch, (bug# ?) I wouldn’t mind testing and take if it is good.

  9. Sorry for the multiple posts. I didn’t have cookies enabled thus didn’t see that my posts are awaiting moderation. Bug # is 221974. The attached patch is quite old though (2004) so I doubt that it still applies. I don’t think my C skills are up to scratch atm, if I get some time I might try to dive into it, but I’m way too busy right now (isn’t that always the problem?).

  10. You should be having a working 2007 support for the next release. Things are very early to say what is in place. But there are definite attempts to get that in for the next release.

  11. thanks for your reply,

    is it possible for you to give arough estimate on how far off the next release is, are we talk 6, 12, 18 months etc.?

    (i’ll completly understand it if i get a “when it’s done” answer…)

  12. Does anybody know how evolution 2.12 is supposed to upgrade settings and folders from evolution 2.10.1?

  13. sragavan, I upgraded my computer from Ubuntu Feisty to Gutsy beta by doing a fresh install on a new partition. I checked everything worked then migrated my home directory over. It may be that I had run evolution before my old files were copied across or before they were chown’d properly. I stopped all evolution processes and gconfd then deleted the evolution gconf directory – leaving the old ~/.evolution in place but the gconf stuff gets re-created every time and my old settings (folders filters and accounts, etc) don’t get pulled in. Any suggestions?

  14. Sorted it. Didn’t realise evolution used gconf to point to the data files and store the account details. I’ve migrated the evolution section of my old %gconf-tree.xml to the evolution directory of my new gconf tree. Now works.

  15. I like all the new enhancements, but I seem to notice that neither the filters, nor the junk mail filtering seem to apply to the inbox anymore. Junk mail still works. For example, if I select all messages and apply Check for Junk, but incoming mail to inbox just sits there with the filter being applied. I noticed a similar bug in 2.11 http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=444503

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