Linux e-mail evolves

When it comes to the Internet, e-mail has to be, without a doubt, the "killer application". Imagine an Internet without e-mail. Or imagine an average working day without it. For most of us it is even difficult to remember what we did before e-mail, much like workers a few years before couldn`t imagine surviving the corporate world without a fax machine.

The biggest hurdle for most users planning to move across to Linux is that most of their colleagues and clients use Outlook.

Alastair Otter, Journalist, ITWeb

Unfortunately, e-mail has also been one of the great failings of the Linux world and despite the vigorous proponents of console-based applications such as Pine and, even Emacs, there has been little on offer for Linux users that came anywhere near the likes of Microsoft`s Outlook applications. At least until now.

This week the Ximian team finally released Evolution 1.0, an unashamed clone of Outlook that has been a fairly long time in coming. Driven by the Ximian group, also a prime mover behind the Gnome desktop project, Evolution is a full-featured organiser, with calendars and to-do lists, e-mail functions including HTML views and inline attachment readers, as well as the ability to set up virtual folders and synchronise with Palm OS-based handhelds.

Having used Evolution since its early beta incarnations, I`m fairly sold on the concept and as much as I don`t like to admit it, the one thing I missed when I gave up Windows completely was Outlook. Over the past few years I`ve graduated from the console-based Pine to the graphical KMail, none of which had all the functions most office-bound users need.

Earlier beta versions of Evolution were incredibly unstable and after losing my mail for the umpteenth time, I was about to give up on it because I was convinced there were too many bugs to make it workable. But the Evolution team has done a great job in just the last couple of months and I`ve been using pre-releases of the application as my only e-mail for the last few months without a hitch.

However, no matter how good Evolution is, it is not enough to just have a stable and feature-rich application if your goal is to win over the hearts and minds of users hooked on other e-mail clients. In particular, Outlook users. The biggest hurdle for most users planning to move across to Linux is that most of their colleagues and clients use Outlook, making it very difficult for them to share documents and schedule meetings with typical Linux e-mail clients.

The Evolution team has taken a very interesting direction in this respect, and together with announcing the release of version 1.0 of Evolution, it has also announced it will release a connector for Microsoft Exchange servers, making it possible for Evolution users to interact with Outlook users as they always have. What makes the move even more interesting is that the connector will not be distributed for free, but will be sold on a per-user basis.

It is a clever move and one that the team hopes will eventually support the entire Evolution development project. An Evolution spokesman responded to criticism of the move by saying that users who have decided to go with a proprietary system have already chosen their path and charging for software is not a violation of the open source ethos.

Of all the developments in the rapidly changing Linux world, the release of Evolution could very well revolutionise the perception of the operating system among business and home users. At its worst, Evolution still provides Linux users with an excellent all-round e-mail application that puts them on par with other users.