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Having a notification when new email arrives can be nice and really useful if you're waiting for an important message. But if you're using a desktop email client or maybe a third party webmail service, you might not want to run a big client application or have to keep checking that tab in Firefox to see if new mail has arrived.

Mail Notification is a small application that can run in your system tray area on GNOME (but it also runs fine on KDE, Xfce or pretty much any other desktop environment) that sits there and checks your account(s) for new email. If there's a new message, it notifies you and you can then open a full client to read it in.

This little app is more clever than its simplicity suggests. For example, if supported by your email service, it supports push email with IMAP IDLE so that it doesn't have to periodically poll the server and use up unnecessary bandwidth. It also supports lots of different account types.

It also has direct integration with Evolution, so it can check accounts that you have set up in the email client there without any further configuration. However, the Evolution support does require that Evolution is running in the background.

To install the application on Ubuntu, you can simply go to Applications > Add/Remove and search for mail-notification. You will also need fetchyahoo and getlive for Yahoo and Hotmail support.

On other Linux distributions, the install process will be similar. Once the application is installed, in GNOME you will find it under Applications > Internet.

You simply choose which type of account you want to configure (supported types include IMAP, POP, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail), enter the details and then let Mail Notification sit in the background until a message comes along.

As I said, Mail Notification is a very simple application, but it is especially useful in conjunction with a webmail-based email service. You can keep a check on your email without having to keep a browser tab dedicated to the email service open all the time.

Thanks to Adrian who pointed out this app in the comments to a previous post, noting its Evolution support.

Welcome back to Part 2 of this series - pitting GNOME's Evolution Personal Information Manager (PIM) suite against KDE's Kontact.

If you haven't read Part 1, please take the time to do so, as I'll be making quite a few comparisons between Evolution, covered there, and Kontact.

Now, we continue with KDE's Kontact.

Kontact

Interface

Kontact's interface has some similarities with that of Evolution. One of the most striking differences is the fact that in many areas there are three sidebars.

On the far left you have a sidebar for switching between the different sub-applications - Mail, Contacts and the like, and then in Mail, you'll have another sidebar for your mailboxes and then a main area split into a message list and the preview pane.

The addition of this triple-vertical-pane approach for me makes the interface a lot more cluttered and less easy to pick up straight away.

Certainly, though, it feels less like an absolute copy of Outlook than Evolution; it feels like an application developed for KDE, rather than a clone of something else that is just ported over. Where Evolution feels a bit like a GNOME slant on a Windows app, Kontact really does feel very much an integral part of KDE.

It's worth mentioning as well that Kontact is quite literally, a collection of distinct KDE apps that are simply stitched together into a single application. Unlike Evolution, it is possible to launch each component, or 'part' in KDE terminology, as a separate application on your desktop.

Email

One thing that really bugs me about the KMail part of Kontact is the fact that by default, it only shows you messages in plain text view.

I fully appreciate why you'd want to send email as plain text and why you might prefer reading email as plain text, but the fact that it is so incredibly difficult to read an HTML-formatted message out of the box is infuriating.

In terms of searching, KMail sadly lacks an advanced full text message search as far as I can see. The toolbar-based search works fine, though, if you only need to search message subject or sender.

Calendaring and Sharing

The Calendar module is similar to Evolution's, although it does sport the three-pane layout which I don't like. You can share events with others through the context menu; starting a new message with an attached .ics of the event. This works more smoothly than Evolution - and you can actually type a message in the body!

Interestingly, this time I experienced a crash importing an ICS file into an existing calendar, but I had no problem making a new calendar with my exported events from Google Calendar. In addition, the Google Calendar specific CalDAV support didn't work either.

Extra Features

I'm going to diverge from my self-imposed structure for just a moment here. One of the best features of Kontact is that it is relatively easy to bolt a new KPart into the application. I particularly am impressed with the Feeds module; a example of this - taking the standalone Akregator application for KDE and putting it into a Kontact.

Having support for RSS news feeds in an application like this I think is an excellent idea, allowing you hopefully to bring together all of the information you care about into a single applciation.

There are also several other modules available that Evolution lacks, including a Journal and support for Usenet newsgroups.

Integration

Within the suite itself, Kontact has a similar level of integration to Evolution. You can obviously send a calendar event in Mail, access your Contacts from any part of the app and so on.

A nice feature which increases the utility of the suite is that any alarms you have set for events in your calendar can erm... go off even if the application is closed. The Calendar - and therefore alarms - part of Kontact is handled by KOrganiser, which runs a daemon which sounds the alarm even without needing Kontact open.

Kontact also feels very much like a first-class citizen on the KDE desktop. It behaves like other KDE applications do and brings a lot of functionality together to try and become the information hub of your KDE desktop.

Conclusion

So regardless of their desktop environment, which of these suites solves this PIM problem better? Of course, a lot of this is going to come down to personal opinion.

I think mine is clear, however. Despite being a KDE user for most of my time on Linux, I have found that I do prefer Evolution.

Yes, yes, I don't like how it feels very much like an Outlook clone, but the interface is just a whole lot cleaner than Kontact. KDE's philosophy of giving the user endless configurability makes Kontact's interface (and particularly its configuration) very cluttered and confusing unless you are already familiar with it.

The feed reader functionality in Kontact is excellent, however, and adding this into a single 'information dashboard' I think could be extremely useful. Unfortunately, this doesn't make up for the fact that the rest of the Kontact interface feels too complex and sometimes a little bit... well... old-fashioned (plain text email? I agree, but I do need to read HTML mail sometimes).

If you are a die-hard KDE user and you are very familiar with the way that KDE interfaces tend to work, you may well find Kontact to be the better choice. Particularly if you have already put a lot of investment into KDE applications, the integration of them into a single suite is very useful and an admirable achievement.

For me, though, Evolution wins this PIM battle. It might be a bit Outlook-alike (if you'll excuse the pun), but it just... feels better.

Not that I'll be switching to it. Despite writing this article and having had a good play with both, I actually still prefer keeping applications of this nature separate, so I'll be continuing to use Thunderbird for my IMAP email when I'm on Linux (under KDE, I might add).

A Personal Information Management (PIM) suite is supposedly a single application that gives you your email, contacts, calendar and other important information. Bringing Mail, Contacts, Calendar and more into one application is something that many find useful.

On the Linux and Unix platforms there are two main competitors in this space - Evolution 2.24.2, for the GNOME desktop and KDE's Kontact 4.1.3. I'm going to take a look at both programs, side-by-side and compare them.

Regardless of which desktop environment these applications are designed for (Evolution for GNOME and Kontact for KDE), which application is, for lack of a better word, 'better'?

In this two part series, I'm going to look at each app and focus on the interface, email (particularly searching and organising), calendaring (with a focus on sharing), and integration (both within the suites themselves and with the desktop outside of them).

First, to GNOME's Evolution.

Evolution

Interface

If you've ever used Microsoft Outlook before, the Evolution interface is perhaps more than just reminiscent. Throughout, Evolution heavily emulates the way Outlook operates, meaning that Outlook users should quickly find their feet in the client.

It feels well laid out; a sidebar to the left shows you your mailbox list in Mail, calendar list in Calendar etc. and to the bottom of the sidebar you can switch between the components - to go from Mail to Contacts for example. The right hand area is dedicated to whatever you're actually doing - the message list, for example, in Mail.

Email

Evolution has some powerful email search functionality. You can use the Search Box in the toolbar to search for a message, however this only searches the Subject and Sender of the message. Fine for many tasks, but not always enough.

There is also an Advanced Search feature available on the menu, however, that offers full text searching of messages. I found it to be powerful and fairly fast, even in a mailbox with tens of thousands of individual messages.

Finding that one message you're looking for quickly is an important feature of a mail client. Evolution largely gets this right. It could be easier to do a full text search, but provided you know where to look, you won't lose something for long.

Calendaring and Sharing

The Calendar module works well, again, being extremely similar to that of its Microsoft Office counterpart.

I had problems using the Google Calendar CalDAV support with Evolution. I think the fact that the username contained an '@' character was causing issues, so I was a little disappointed not to have that functionality. Importing an .ics iCalendar file worked fine, however.

Sharing events by attaching them as an .ics file to an email is quickly and easily done through the context menu. This worked well and I was able to share an event with myself on another calendar system. When you share an invite in this way, however, you rather curiously can't edit the message body - meaning you have to send a blank message. Rather irritating.

Integration

The integration within the components of Evolution itself is good. You can, as I mentioned, send a Calendar event directly via email, but also you can do things like highlight a snippet of text in an email and make a Task directly from the context menu. Little touches like that make Evolution a well integrated suite of PIM functionality.

Evolution also has very strong links with the GNOME desktop and other GNOME applications. For example, you can access your calendar events directly from the GNOME date/time widget in the panel and it supports syncing with your Pidgin IM contacts.

You also get a nice mail notification on receiving a new message that fits right in with the rest of the GNOME interface, appearing as a bubble in the notification area of the panel.

To Be Continued...

Join me in Part 2 tomorrow for my thoughts on Kontact in these areas and which application, in my opinion, is the best PIM on this platform.

Part 2 now published

Oh and by the way - a very Happy New Year from all at FOSSwire.com (yes, we're a little late to it)!