The (d)evolution of Evolution

[David Malcolm]

On Mon, 2004-12-06 at 11:51 -0500, Joe Klemmer wrote:
> Synopsis:
>          Evolution hangs for 5 minutes or more when connecting to an IMAP
> server, thus rendering email reading impossible.  This happens with all
> IMAP servers.  The hanging "feature" does not exist under Thunderbird.
> Does anyone know what causes this and, more importantly, how to fix it?
> 
> Rant:
>          I have been using Evolution for my email for quite a while now. 
>   It always seemed to me that every version increase would lose some 
> feature or function that was great.  Over all it keeps getting worse and 
> worse as the versions go up.  Now FC3 ships with Evolution 2.  The UI 
> changes are really bad.  The problem is that it's trying to look and act 
> more and more like Outlook.  Outlook just plain SUCKS!  Outlook wasn't 
> good when times were good.  However, I have been sticking with Evolution
> because it has, by far, the best spell checking of any application I've
> ever used.  And my English spelling is really that bad as to need this.
> So all in all it's been ok.
> 
>          There has always been one small problem with it that's now 
> become insurmountable.  Every time Evolution connects to the IMAP server 
> the app will hang.  It'll sit there unmoving and unresponsive until it's
> done talking to the server.  As the version numbers have been going up
> the length of this hang-while-talking has increased.  I can only guess
> that this is also part of the Outlook cloning process.
> 
>          Yesterday I got completely fed up and gave Thunderbird a shot. 
>   While it has some issues with functionality (not lack of, just 
> different) there is absolutely no hanging or waiting with it.  None at 
> all.  I am not forced to wait up to the 5 minutes it now takes for 
> Evolution to finish doing whatever it's doing and allow me to read 
> email.  What would to take hours with Evolution takes minutes with 
> T-bird.  I'm not exaggerating.
> 
>          So now I have a dilemma...  If I switch to T-bird I will lose 
> my spell checking and also my address list.  Oh, BTW, the utility 
> evolution-addressbook-export that comes with FC3 does not work at all 
> for CSV format.  When I try it I get a funky binary output file full of 
> 0x0A characters.  Right now it seems to me that the balance point has 
> finally shifted, though.  I need to be able to read my email and if that 
> means switching to T-bird and redoing my address list by hand and 
> sacrificing a little spell checking then it's worth it.
> 
>          But I'll make one last attempt to see if I can get Evolution in 
> a usable state.  Does anyone out there know how to fix this problem?

Please start evolution by running this at a bash prompt:
CAMEL_VERBOSE_DEBUG=1 evolution

This should spew large amounts of debug information, including the
conversation its having with the IMAP server.  Hopefully this should
shed some light on what's going on.

You should also have a look at bug 139145, and see to what extent the
symptoms you're seeing match the ones described there; if you believe it
to be a separate bug, please file it as such:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=139145

Please can you file the evolution-addressbook-export bug separately in
BZ.

Thanks; hopefully we can get these fixed.

> 
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