Thuderbird as an Evolution replacement ? (Evolution things...)

[Peter Teuben]

On [Sat Dec 30 17:15], Kim Lux wrote:
> 
> I've got large stores of emails on my personal computer from mailing
> lists like this one.
> 
> I'm finding that Evolution is slow to process incoming mail when
> filtering spam and it runs with a high nice priority that seems to hog
> the CPU sometimes when I am multi tasking. 
> 
> I installed Thunderbird on a friends Windows PC the other day and it
> looked pretty spiffy.  How does it compare to Evolution ?  Is it robust
> enough to handle really large email archives ?

for email thunderbird is much faster in startup (ok, my mail archive is 500MB,
in many files and some sub-directories), but there is ONE big drawback that
Thunderbird 2.0 hasn't solved surprisingly:  it doesn't easily work with classic
mbox files. There was some story about a plugin , but it's VERY laborious
and what I love about evolution is that i can rsync my Mail directory at
work with the laptop and then do offline reading (and even replying,
though you then distribute your mail archive over two places...).   Evolution
will happily allow you to use a symbolic link to a tree that contain all kinds
of mbox files. 

In thunderbird mail has to be imported, and it will create a msf (some
index) file. It's even more complicated with a directory that contains
mbox files. I was able to sort of do this manually, but it's high
maintenance to keep my tree now up to sync. Yuck. 

It's not as bad as apple's mail, where from each message in a mail file
it creates a new file!! That's gotta super ineffient, i was totally
surprised by this at the time and that was just one of the many reasons
macosx fails to just work for me.


 - peter