Evolution in Maui

[rocky7x]

Just thought I'd give some real-life track record with a not so standard setup. Since KDE-PIM is basically not usable for Exchange accounts (not even via Davmail unfortunately, since the compositor is not compatible with Outlook generated HTML) and Thunderbird, even though it has workarounds and tries to support all features, some of them work a bit flaky, thus I thought I'd try installing Gnome's Evolution in Maui. After installing tons of dependent packages and the evolution-ews connector, I've created an Office365 EWS Exchange account and played some time with it. A short summary is that EVERYTHING WORKS! It is quite unbelievable, but the ews connector supports 100% of Exchange functionalities I use (even configuration of Out of office messages, free/busy querying of other users when creating new meetings and setting Important flags). And it is VERY fast, much faster than Thunderbird via IMAP. Moreover, Thunderbird cannot connect to Exchange servers that disable IMAP access (only via Davmail, which is quite slow). So I have to conclude that my experiment was 100% successful and I will keep on using Evolution (and hope I don't find some showstopper )

[kdemeoz]

Hi Rocky

I can't quite believe that mine seems to be the first & only reply! If you might pls indulge me:

1. Are you still using Evolution?
2. Is it still doing everything you need a PIM to do, & doing it properly & reliably?
3. What version are you using; 3.18.5.2 ex the repo, or a newer version [& if the latter, did you download the source then build it yourself, or use a PPA as per https://forums.mauilinux.org/showthread....7#pid41057 ]?
4. How did you get all your data into it, & was the process acceptable or a nightmare?

I last mucked about with Evo in 2013/2014, & found the experience quite scarring. Right from the start it was unpleasant -- the import process was awful & created a ghastly mess of duplicated Calendar items, ALL Tasks lost all record of completion dates & status, so squillions of closed Tasks were then abruptly Overdue, & my thousands of historic emails, carefully stored in a detailed multi-level folder/subfolder hierarchical structure, landed in Evo all together in a single top-level folder. This was horrible [was coming from Outlook 2010, albeit this time (IF i risk it) would be coming from Thunderbird+Lightning]. Moreover, when simply trying to use Evo as a daily tool, it kept using 100% cpu & often crashing Mint 17.x KDE4 [as i used back then].

Presumably none of those horrors afflict your experience? I do not need any MS Exchange interaction, so that's at least one degree of less complication for me compared to you i think.

Finally a more general question for you & any other reader -- is it considered "ok" or otherwise "very unwise & should not do" to install a very large complex Gnome package into a Plasma5 distro? Thanks.

[rocky7x]

Hi,

I used it for a few weeks, but then decided that I miss the conversation view from Thunderbird and my work habits are too influenced by years of using Thunderbird. So I'm back with it. But, nevertheless, Evolution worked 100% reliably. To answer your questions, yes everything worked and was reliable. I used the version from Ubuntu repositories, so the one that is available by default in Maui. Import was very easy because I have all mail on the server, so I just let it download everything. I have some 8 years of mail communication, cca 20'000 mails, and it all worked well. Calendar also automatic download, all events worked fine.

[kdemeoz]

Thanks Rocky.

Yesterday after my post, my impatient curiosity got the better of me, so i decided to experiment with this [but for now only] in one of my Maui VMs [running in my Maui Host OS, of course]. So far i have successfully imported into that VM's Evo, my TB's Contacts, & Lightning's Calendar & Tasks.

The current major challenge though is the Email. It continues to irritate & amaze me that just like with my original testing a few years ago, Evo Devs still have not provided a dedicated import tool of TB's emails. Bonkers.

Based on myriad online How To's [eg, http://gaveen.owain.org/2007/07/howto-mi...rd-to.html ] which blithely instruct that one can simply effect the migration via copying all the Mbox files over from TB to Evo, only after wasting many hours did i eventually discover that in fact Evo stopped also using Mbox, & changed to Maildir, quite a long time ago, hence all those guides now are rubbish.

I discovered http://batleth.sapienti-sat.org/projects/mb2md/ & https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/mb2md/ ["A Perl script that takes one or more Mbox format mailbox files in a directory and convert them to Maildir format mailboxes"], & that this pgm is in our Repo, so now i am trying to deduce how to go about doing this.

Changing PIMs / email clients should not be this hard!! [& especially so, given that even after all this effort & time, even if i do succeed in importing the emails, i might then decide that Evo's behaviour & capabilities are still not for me, ie, staying with TB remains a real possibility, but to know that, i first have to thoroughly test Evo].

[kdemeoz]

Having now wasted another day on this venture, i've had no choice but to abandon once again any realistic chance of migration from TB to Evo as my PIM. That Perl script pgm did indeed produce converted format mailbox files, but created a horrible flat directory structure & with multiple spurious characters in most of the resultant directories in said flattened tree. Very many hours were spent progressively working my way through bulk & manual edits in Dolphin & in Konsole to try to correct the carnage, & LOTS of trial & error was required to discover exactly what naming conventions were acceptable to Evo [when it didn't like incompatible edits of specific directories, it simply omitted showing them in the UI, but most of this work was unintuitive wrt knowing what was compatible, hence all the T&E].

Still with a large amount of editing necessary, by chance i happened to notice the number of emails in one of the Evo folders, vs in the original TB folder... & the numbers were different! Gahhh, i should have checked this immediately after the mb2md conversion, but foolishly just presumed it all worked fine. I then checked a lot of the other folders, & whilst some agreed, the majority were missing lots of emails. At that point i recognised that the adventure had to be summarily aborted... such data loss is obviously intolerable.

It's a pity; Evo has always looked to me like it has a lot of potential, but yet again i have had to walk away from it.

[rocky7x]

That's strange, for me the mail migration, even offline, was never a problem between any Linux mail clients. Very easy approach, like the following:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/519728/m...imap-mails

The only problem I ever had with mail was trying to migrate Outlook pst files, which is a nightmare...

[kdemeoz]

Oh yes, that method is reliable, & certainly works, but for me is completely impractical [&/or i am too lazy]. My thousands of historic emails are stored not in my Inbox, but in a detailed multi-level subfolder hierarchy comprising 321 individual subfolders. Following that standard Evo GUI guide per that & similar pages, would need me to repeat the process, manually, 321 times.

Even on that same page, did you notice:

yes, about 100 folders – rubo77 Sep 3 '14 at 18:29
 
Unfortunately you have to do one at a time. – Mitch♦ Sep 3 '14 at 18:30

Furthermore, the last comment...

You can, just t try copying the mbox files into ~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.sbd/. Make sure that you copy first justto make sure it works.

...is obsolete; it was valid back when Evo still used Mbox format like TB, but Evo now uses Maildir format, as i wrote a couple of posts above. Furthermore, with this new format is also a different path, it's now:

Code:

/home/kdemeoz/.local/share/evolution/mail/local

As i said, it's exasperating that the Evo Devs have not helped here.