ThoughtFactory.CreateThought() A random collection of thoughts from an easily bored developer

Evolution at Work

I very rarely see the Gmail front page, as I've usually got an active session kicking around on whatever machine I'm using. This means that I never get to see the Gmail blog updates that they feature on the front page. I'm far too lazy to actually subscribe to the Gmail Blog RSS feed (and I still haven't found a Linux RSS reader I like, so I won't be doing that for a little while), so I usually miss out on all the latest Google Mail related gossip.

Tonight I went to check my mail using Safari on an old Mac laptop we have floating about. It was the first time I'd used this particular account/browser combination to access Gmail, so I was confronted with the login screen.

Seeing as it was already in front of me, I gave the page a quick cursory scan to see if there was anything of interest. I'm glad I did, because I noticed the latest Gmail blog entry, which was centred around Gmail's IMAP support I must have seriously missed the boat on that one, because I didn't even notice that Gmail supported IMAP.

I set about trying to configure a mail client on Linux to work with this new-found IMAP goodness. I already had two clients installed; Evolution, the default Gnome email client, and Thunderbird, from the same guys who make the little browser that could, so I was determined to pick one of those, at least in the short term.

I'd used Evolution way back in 2002 when it was the only linux mail client that could connect to Exchange, so I thought I'd give it a go first up. Gmail uses a few funny ports for SMTP and IMAP, so I grabbed those settings from the IMAP client configuration page. They haven't made a specific page for Evolution, so I just picked "Other" and away I went.

Initially everything went great. All of my mail came down, and the test messages I sent to some of my other email accounts worked fine. Great! I was all but ready to mark this one off as a job well done. There was one little problem, though: whenever I tried to reply to a message, i got a nasty error message telling me:


Error while performing operation. Host lookup failed: myemailaddress: Name or service not known

Hmm. Just to make sure that there were no whacky Evolution settings to consider, I went and grabbed an Evolution specific tutorial. No luck. I even tried switching to my ISP's SMTP server. Still no luck.

Thunderbird's icon was calling me from the launch panel, so I thought I'd give that a go to see if it suffered from the same problem as Evolution. Google have made a specific guide on configuring Gmail IMAP for Thunderbird, so to avoid complications I followed it word for word. I wasn't going to risk some silly configuration mistake getting in the way of my inexplicable need for a thick client email solution.

It took around 20 seconds to have the entire account configured. I got all my mail, sent some test messages (both new compositions and replies to other messages), and it all just worked. Amazing.

So in the end, it looks like Thunderbird won by default. I could go back and try to fix Evolution, but I honestly can't be bothered. I'll give Thunderbird a go for a few weeks and see how I like it. I may even mode back to using the Gmail browser-based client. Or maybe I'll just start answering all my email via the Gmail Mobile client. Then I'd be able to fulfill my lifelong dream of developing  horrible thumb-based RSI from excessive predictive texting.

Edit: Looks like I spoke too soon. I'm currently having fun with this bug. After doing a GTK update last night, Thunderbird has been stuck in full screen mode. Oh well, I didn't move to Linux because it was easy!