Thunderbird to Evolution

Thunderbird has always been a favorite on my machine for connecting to my email accounts but last night I switched to Evolution just because Evolution looked a better fit on my machine aesthetic wise than Thunderbird 🤷‍♂️️. I have tried couple of terminal email clients in the past but those always introduced more friction than I would like. Since there’s no easy export/import way to get all the IMAP settings into Evolution I had to configure 4 of my accounts manually. There was one lone account on Office365 for which this guide came really handy.

Managing multiple email accounts is easier with an unified inbox in Thunderbird but there’s no obvious alternative to that in Evolution. Evolution has Search folders instead. Personally, I would like the option to rearrange these search folders other than just alphabetically.

The 3 above are custom search folders that combine the Drafts, Inbox and Sent folders of all the accounts. The rules to define these are pretty simple.

Evolution is faster in opening folders with lots of emails and doesn’t get stuck like Thunderbird did on Archive, Spam, and Junk folders. Evolution respects the font size I have set for plain text emails. Thunderbird thinks it is okay to disregard the font size and change it to a hard to read size everytime I open it fresh. What’s more, Evolution picked up my PGP fingerprint from its default location without any extra work. In terms of memory footprint, Evolution does seem to consume a bit more but there’s nothing alarming.

Overall, I am very happy with the switch but will remove Thunderbird after a week just to make sure there are no crippling issues with Evolution.

Day 77 - Join Me in #100DaysToOffload