FOSSwire

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)!

If you're experimenting with Linux, or even moving over to it and you're currently using Thunderbird as your email client on Windows, you might be wondering how to move your emails and profile from Windows over to Linux.

This process can even be used as part of a bigger project, for example to move from Outlook Express or another Windows-only email client on Windows to Thunderbird on Linux. If you first Import from your Windows client to Thunderbird on Windows, you can then follow this tutorial to move that over to Linux. But anyway, let's get on.

The first thing I recommend doing isn't essential, but can prevent headaches later. In your Windows copy of Thunderbird, go to File > Compact Folders. This cleans your mail folders up and can prevent issues with unread counts not being correct once your profile folder has been migrated over.

The process is reasonably simple, provided you know where your profile folder is on Windows and can transfer the files somehow between Windows and Linux. To find your profile folder, follow the instructions on this page that pertain to the version of Windows you are running.

Once you've found that profile folder (and you're inside Thunderbird > Profiles), there should be a randomly named folder ending with .default. Copy this folder somehow to your Linux machine.

Over on Linux, we first need to remove any existing profile information for Thunderbird if you've opened it already. Obviously, make sure you're not actually using Thunderbird on this user account for anything important, or this step will end up deleting all your email there. You have been warned.

Go into your home folder on Linux, and choose View > Show Hidden Files. If you've already opened Thunderbird, there will be a folder called .thunderbird (Debian and Ubuntu users, .mozilla-thunderbird). Delete it - as long as you're sure there's nothing important there.

Now (re)create that folder, so right-click, Create New Folder and name the folder .thunderbird, or .mozilla-thunderbird on Debian/Ubuntu. Go inside your new folder and paste your profile folder that you copied from Windows.

There is one final step you need to take to get your mail up and running in Linux. Inside .thunderbird, you need to make a file called profiles.ini. Do a right-click and create a new text file in the folder, and name it profiles.ini. Open up this new file in a text editor, and paste in the following:

[General]
StartWithLastProfile=1
[Profile0]
Name=default
IsRelative=1
Path=xxxxxxxx.default

Replace the xxxxxxxx with the real name of your profile folder that you pasted. Save the file and quit, and now launch Thunderbird. Your email should load up as if nothing has happened and all your archives should be up and rolling.

Should you run into any problems with folder unread counts being incorrect as I mentioned above, you'll have to go through the affected folders, mark items so that the unread count is correct again, then perform File > Compact Folders to force those changes to save to disk, or the problem will reoccur.