I was just setting up Evolution again and went through the steps of setting up my personal account and my Ubuntu account. I’ve heard some people run into problems doing this considering the Ubuntu account, on the incoming side, is bound to your default address in Launchpad, but you still need to send mail out. Here is how I did it.

You’ll be needing a gmail.com account. Then go to Settings, Accounts and if you want to add a gmail account, at the first thing in the list, click on “Add another email address”. If the other e-mail account is on… let’s say: yahoo, you’ll have to look a little lower at “Get mail from other accounts:” and

Zimbra has both commercial and Open Source versions. The Open Source project is very interesting in that it has many features that people want and looks great. You can use Zimbra Desktop to gather mail from many different accounts including Zimbra Mail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, AOL, Outlook or any other work or personal email account using POP or IMAP.

I have noticed for a long time now, much talk of how to remove Evolution from Ubuntu, understandable, if like myself, you use another client for your mail/news. The parts of these discussions that concerned me is the number of people adamant that it will kill your installation.

The Evolution mail client has been the default such application in Ubuntu since I got to know of Linux. Sure it is the default GNOME mail/calendar application, but I really am of the view that Ubuntu needs to drop it in favor of say Mozilla's very brilliant Thunderbird.

Evolution is the official personal information manager and workgroup information management tool for GNOME. It combines e-mail, calendar, address book, and task list management functions. Its user interface and functionality are similar to Microsoft Outlook. It can be connected to a Microsoft Exchange Server using its web interface and an Evolution add-on.

An e-mail client, aka Mail User Agent (MUA), aka e-mail reader is a frontend computer program used to manage e-mail.

Here's my problem. I need a calendar app that rudely beeps to tell me when to go to meetings and such. In Ubuntu, that means the Evolution mail client, which has an extensive calendar function, or so I'm told. But I don't run Evolution. I use Thunderbird to manage my mail, and Thunderbird doesn't have a calendar function ... or does it?

I've used Evolution, the default email client in Ubuntu, for a couple of years to manage numerous mail accounts.  In general, I think it's a great application.  But as with everything in life, there's always room for improvement.  Below, I consider the most chronically frustrating and poorly designed aspects of Evolution, and how they could be fixed.