IMAP Mail Client Evaluation

Evolution

Evolution probably has the largest amount of outside development resources behind it at the moment, and is also the easiest to get working with Kerberos 4 support (because Dan wanted to test it against the MIT PO servers). I have used Evolution 0.15 (a beta release) for a week and found it to be fairly usable and have a decent feature set. It does include a number of features besides mail (a calendar planning tool, a task list, an address book, and a news feeds tool) which would likely be welcomed by users but might involve biting off more than we can chew as far as maintenance and support.

One of the interesting things Evolution supports is automatic GPG verification of messages. We would have to put GPG into the release to really take advantage of this feature, though.

Incorporating Evolution into the release would be fairly easy. It would require a couple of library upgrades and the incorporation of a few GNOME packages we don't currently have (gnome-print, bonobo, bonobo-conf, gal, and gtkhtml), some of which would also be required by Nautilus and possibly other GNOME packages we might become interested in. There were no major gotchas in the build system, although I found a couple of minor bugs which needed to be fixed to get Evolution to compile in our environment. See release-77 [2995] for details.

I noted the following problems while running Evolution:

• Sometimes it fails to start up, saying "Cannot initialize the Ximian Evolution shell: Configuration Database not found". This problem occurred more often with Evolution 0.14, and seems to be mostly specific to particular machines (I have observed the problem with Evolution 0.15, reliably on one machine and very sporadically on another). The real problem seems to be an inability to communicate with a subprocess called "wombat". I suspect a race condition, though it could also be a failure for wombat to start up on some machines.
• Sometimes evolution-mail crashes overnight, and it always displays an error dialog after my tokens expire about inability to save my mail folder.
• There did not appear to be a way to configure the fonts used by Evolution, so it comes out kind of tiny on my 1600x1200 15" screen. This would not be a problem for Athena machines as long as we restrict them to 1280x1024 resolution, but it could become one of many such problems in the long run.
• Evolution uses many subprocesses which communicate together using CORBA calls. This makes it difficult to debug even easily reproduced problems like the first problem above.

In addition to any necessary bug-fixing (some of which might be obviated by a production Evolution release), I anticipate we would need to make the following local modifications to the Evolution source code base:

• We would need to add Hesiod support.
• We would need it to preconfigure itself with appropriate settings. (Stock evolution pops up a configuration wizard when it first starts up.)
• We would need to add a way to configure it to suppress the local mail folders Evolution creates, in order to make IMAP folders the only ones in the default setup. (Right now if you don't have an ~/evolution/local, Evolution creates one for you.)
• We would need to add MH support, although some of the necessary code is already present in Evolution.
• We would eventually need to add krb5 support as well as krb4 support to the IMAP routines, after the MIT PO servers support it. This is probably not worth doing initially since it's not easy to test while the MIT PO servers only support krb4.

Here are my estimates of the initial work required, assuming relatively solid commitment by one developer:

Here's my grade sheet: