I have been using Evolution since more than 7 years now as my default email client and it has been more than a while that I have been disapointed with it mostly because of how slow it handled new mail. I have assumed that most of the fault was due to spamassasin spam filtering plugin. I tried on numerous occasions to change the default Ubuntu spamassassin and evolution configuration but with little if any results. This weekend I decided to make the switch despite various equaly bad reviews I found on the net regarding Mozilla Thunderbird.

After installing it with apt-get I configured the several accounts and pushed the “Get mail” button on the several hunderts of emails left for the test. This is a normal amount of mail (mostly junk) which I find in my inbox after 1 day of weekend. Since this operation took almost 5 minutes in evolution I was suprised in a very nice way since the start to see it took (including spam filtering) no more than 30s without any processor spikes as it was the case with the spamassasin processes.

Migration of data was also very easy since it only involved copying the Maibox files from evolution’s storage to thunderbird’s:

cp ~/.evolution/mail/local/Sent .mozilla-thunderbird/h2ffx7ja.default/Mail/Local\ Folders/Sent

Of course I had to configure filters again but it was a small price to pay.

In conclusion I feel very happy for the moment with the migration choice as it solved at least the following problems I had with evolution:

  • very slow mail fetching with spam filtering enabled
  • lot of resource consumption especially related to spam filtering and folder re-indexing
  • password errors related to keystore/hibernate (accounts passwords where lost upon hibernate)
  • folder mismatch even after a sync errors

The only problem I had was regarding some self-signed mail certificates but this plugin solved the problem for me.

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Rodiq » karmic koala -

[…] my email accounts settings in evolution, before the install … Importing emails is very easy, a good tutorial here. Thunderbird is much faster, and spam filtering is amasing, even if the settings are not that […]