Evolution
I have tested Evolution 1.5.5 today from Jeremy Katz's Evo source RPMs on a Fedora Core 1 machine. Beside that Evo crashes very often (which by itself is "OK" for a developer version) its IMAP support still has not gotten any better. I have tried Evolution since pre 1.0 version from time to time but they still do not get the IMAP support right, as it seems. It feels awfully slow compared to Thunderbird. It does not show the directory structure as I'm used to. I have an UW IMAP server with plain mbox (which I need to change some time...) with my mails in the mail/ subdirectory. Thunderbird (and Mozilla and Netscape before) show the subdirectories of mail/ at the top level, as it should be since I gave mail/ as namespace. Although I set the namespace in Evo to the mail as recommended it still shows me a directory called mail with the other directories as sub folders. This is just ugly. One more level of hierachy that is useless and unwanted.
I also found Evo to be generally slow connecting on startup. This maybe due the fact that Evo seems not to save any folder or message information from the last run.
Another thing I don't like is the message preview pane. The white box around the message is not extended to the whole frame it is shown in but it is only as big as the message it needs to display. This looks pretty bad in my eyes.
For now I will go with Thunderbird and will give it a try again in a couple of months. I would really lke the Palm sync feature I think. Even more I hope to get a central address book used in other apps like Gaim. With MultiSync and the Evo data server this could become a universal interface for my PIM data! MultiSync might become the software to keep my Palm, mobile phone and desktop data in sync and the data server may make the data accessible from everywhere...
