Today is the third birthday of GNOME bug #336076, which I filed to report a particularly idiotic regression in Evolution's IMAP code. (Update: It looks like I also posted about it on Advogato, too.)

Instead of just issuing a simple STATUS command to check the status of each folder for new mail, Evolution started to actually open the folder, fetch the headers for all new mail in it, re-fetch the flags for all mail in it.... and it does this for every folder that it's checking (which, with bug #336074 still unfixed, is all folders — not just the active folders. So in my case it was continuously re-fetching the flags for years of archived mail in folders which are marked on the server as being inactive.)

This meant that it took Evolution two HOURS to start up that first time, when connected across the Internet. Even when I ran it on a local machine which was connected to the server by Gigabit Ethernet, it still took 23 minutes to start up; downloading half a gigabyte of mail before it was usable.

I don't know what's scarier — the fact that this utterly moronic regression got into the code base in the first place (what in fuck's name were they thinking?), or the fact that GNOME 2.26 went out last week with it still not fixed, three years later.

I've actually moved my older archived mail folders off to a separate server to work around bug #336074, and I've stopped checking for new mail in folders other than the INBOX to work around bug #336076, which is a PITA but is the only way to keep Evolution even vaguely usable — and it's still extremely bad over a slow connection, such as GPRS (or connecting home from China).

It's not just at startup, either. It goes off into the weeds frequently, doing this stuff in the "background" while I'm waiting for it to fetch the mail I just clicked on. Sometimes, I end up using pine to read my email while I'm waiting for Evolution to do whatever weird crack-inspired stuff it's doing with the IMAP server and start responding again.

I think it's about time that the choice of default mail client for GNOME was re-evaluated. Evolution seems to be mostly stagnant, and the changes that are being made seem to be entirely dubious. Version 2.24 was a significant regression in many ways. Evolution is definitely letting the side down.

This kind of post inevitably leads to people mailing suggestions for an alternative MUA. Changing MUAs is a painful process, but I think after the 2.24 release I've reached the point where I'm going to have to give up on Evolution. Things I really need from the MUA are:

• Graphical folder 'tree' showing the number of new mails in each folder (currently broken/disabled in Evolution as described above).
• Ability to reach mail server over ssh: ssh $MAILSERVER exec imapd
• No mangling of outgoing or incoming patches

As far as I'm aware, the latter two requirements rule out Thunderbird. I think I'm going to try Sylpheed. Last time I did that, it would SEGV at startup, which quickly put me off — but I'm sure that's fixed now, and I've heard good things about it. Next alternative if I can't get on with that is probably kmail.

Whatever I use, it would also be nice if it handled the calendar stuff that the Outlook/Exchange weenies use — preferably with the calendar on the Exchange server, but just using its own calendar (as I do in Evolution) would be fine.

(Of course, Evolution being the steaming pile of crap that it is, it fucks up the calendaring too. It has its own idea of what the timezone is, perhaps because it thinks it might be in a different timezone to the rest of the system? So for someone who travels a lot and uses the calendar infrequently, it's fairly much guaranteed that a meeting will be displayed in some arbitrary, wrong, timezone. And just for fun, it stupidly displays the meeting times without any hint about the time zone. )