What?

I have been using Thunderbird for years and before that Mozilla mail but I never used Evolution since everyone seemed to lambaste it. Well I am here to tell you that Evolution is a very capable if not excellent mail client!

Here are my requirements for a mail client:
* Spam filtering
* SSL/TLS support
* Extensive rules support
* Support for mailing lists
* Spellcheck support
* Block remote images by default
* IMAP Support
* GPG Support

Evolution has all these features as well as calendaring and tasks.

Is it heavier than Thunderbird? Yes, but not enough to make a huge difference considering all the added features and you have to add Sunbird, Enigmail and more to reach a equivalent feature set with Thunderbird.

Just to be clear, I still love Thunderbird, but I want to let people know that Evolution isn’t the steaming pile that it is made out to be and if you have avoided Evolution because of you heard you should give it a shot.

I was looking at my laptop today and realized that there are only four remaining applications/components on my system that are closed source or have restrictive licenses:

Lotus Notes
Adobe Flash
Video Driver (Nvidia)
Intel wireless firmware.

Lotus Notes is what we use at work so it is not going away very soon (at all).

I should be able to replace Flash with either Gnash or Swfdec. I tested Gnash today and it still did not work at http://www.barney.com and I will test swfdec later. Other than the Barney site for my daughter my use of Flash is so infrequent that Gnash or swfdec should cover me.

The NV driver is just too slow but I am watching Nouveau closely and when it gets more stable I will switch. I don’t use Compiz and I don’t play games so maybe I should take another look at this.

I don’t think there are any wireless cards that don’t have some sort of closed firmware blob so I don’t think I will be able to do anything about the wireless drivers.

Some closed applications I have replaced over the past year:
1) VMWARE: Replaced with KVM or Innotek’s virtualbox OSE
2) Skype: I rarely used it but I replaced it with Ekiga
3) Sun Java 1.5/1.6: Replaced with IcedTea

Since I work in the technology field I am not the typical user but my day to day usage is pretty typical and if I can be this close to a completely open system then almost anyone else can be as well.