Evolution 2.28.2-1 user reviews

I tried to install the last version 3.0.2 for Windows (on Windows 7, 64b), IT'S A WASTE OF TIME!!! After the installer says "Ok, successfully installed", you cannot start it because it misses some GDK libs. Manually copied to the windows/syswow64 folder, but it still fails with another error messages... A WASTE OF TIME!

Evolution has been utterly useless for me in all the 6 years I've been an Ubuntu user. It is not configurable (configuration choices "magically" revert themselves in the GUI) and configured email accounts disappear from the list mysteriously. When it fails, which is always, it does so either without an error message or with one that is uselessly vague (error messages often don't mention which account is associated with the error, for example.)

It doesn't work for me at all, it never has, and it's such crap even attempting to set it up is painful. I have tried it with at least 7 different accounts and it was able to retrieve one email from one of them once, but then never again and with no obvious reason why.

Evolution is a crappy "groupware" suite that takes on too many diverse tasks and does them all poorly when it can do them at all. Better to use an array of tools which each do one thing well.

0.5 of a gig for an email prg , what else is going on in the background ?????
Put a lot of crap on my drive too.
Didn't work either after a lengthy install and an even longer uninstall with a commercial uninstaller too.
Stay Away

i installed it but wish i saw this reviews first, i have windows 7 ultimate 32 bit i never crashed but it took way to long before it finally started the program i had a problem with cleaning out the trash, i never disappeared it just stayed their...after i saw this in 1 hour time i uninstalled it....happy i did not add my 15 email accounts...because would be a waste of time, i wish someone could make it portable maybe it will run faster also then. wish their was someone like this but goo working for win 7 because microsoft really messed it up now and thunderbird i can not get use to it.

Again I have to agree with every other posting here: Evolution for Windows looks fantastic and works fantastically (when you get it to work without an error popping up). But it is just too unstable! Crashes at the slightest hitch and I am afraid it is just not worth banging your head on the wall for. Great pity because it is the closest clone to MS Outlook around and would be a great comfort for us users that have used Outlook since the year dot.

Come on Evolution/Ubuntu developers (and Mark Shuttleworth) fix the damn thing!

I am so thrilled by the great value Evolution has brought me on my Ubuntu Desktop over the years... so when I saw it was now available for Windows I nearly died with excitement... so I downloaded it... installed it... and cried...

Not tears of happieness or joy... but tears of frustration...

EVERY EMAIL DOWNLOADS TWICE?

CRASHES ON CUE EVERY TIME I OPEN A SECOND UNREAD EMAIL!

I have a Core i5 2.4Ghz Dell Vostro Laptop with 8GB RAM running Windows 7 Pro 64bit - so it\'s not like I am lacking in the resources department.

I give up... and I will now be looking for an alternative to evolution for both my Windows Laptop and my Ubuntu Desktop.

Evolution for Windows has turned me against Evolution in general...

Love Evolution but each time I try to add an attachment the program crashes! Is there a solution to this problem? I use Windows 7 64bit OS. Thanks!

Incredibly bad! What else is there to say? Avoid Evolution for Windows like the plague!!!

I would agree with almost all the negative comments on this forum. Evolution in Linux is a masterpiece and I was hoping the port to windows would be at least half of what the linux version is. Well, I was let down and it is not. Hopefully they continue to work on it. It would be awesome if they could get it working as stable as Outlook. Then the choice to switch would be very easy!

Like others, I use evolution on Linux and it works flawlessly. Tried the windows version on a windows 7 installation. One word says it all - AWFUL!! The most unstable program I have ever seen. Its probably set back the reputation of Linux by about 15 years, and heaven knows how many people will be put off migrating to Linux if THIS is a sample!! Really really terrible!

I use this program on Linux Mint 10 and consider it a brilliant piece of software, surpassing Outlook which I have used on XP and Windows 7 for years. My experiences trying to use it on windows are so bad that I can not adequately describe it without using profanity. Do not waste your time downloading and trying this on windows. It takes minutes to get it to load and it crashes every 10 seconds or so. The windows version of this software,
Evolution 2.28.2 to be specific, is in my opinion, and I am not alone it would appear, if the comments left on bulletin boards are anything to go by, is less than worthless. What an absolute shame.

I just needed a good calendar program that actually works, this failed to do that. First off when I tried to import hopefully a saved calendar from before the window kept freezing when changing the file directory. Than you have to change the view to see the calendar and to get it out of email view, but once you do, it doesn't look like a calendar. You go into the drop down menu to change the view (day, week, month), and it still doesn't even look like a calendar, it just has 2 boxes that says memo and tasks.

Monster program with no help files crashes all the time SLOW and just eats the emails so you cannot find them , it looks like a great idea and I am sure someday they will work out all the bugs but right now I would say DO NOT install it you will be sorry as it is nothing but problems

Windows version only. Ubuntu linux version works fine. Downloaded, installed, ran, crashed. Had to restart Windows t get it to run again, then it crashed again. Uninstalled it, manually checked the registry for likely keys, downloaded it again, installed it, ran it, crashed again. Then the uninstall crashed.

Not what I would call a stable release.

I gave every category a low 1 because I never could get it to run long enough to evaluate it. Tried to uninstall no luck. I had to do a system restore to recover my pc. It is my opinion that this software is not worth the time to download.

I tried 3 times , SORRY three strikes

I tried this on Vista, immediately decided it wasn't very interesting. What WAS interesting was uninstalling it with Revo - over 4,000 (four THOUSAND)registry entries and over 19,000 (nineteen THOUSAND) leftover files. Then, UniBlue Registry Booster found a further 1,000 registry errors associated with the program. Even Adobe isn't that obnoxious.

Evolution as used in Ubuntu is good. I tried Evolution for Windows again this week (Windows XP, SP3 - only 512 MB RAM though) and it was unusable, with continual messages about some sort of "storage" crash, and error messages going off to Microsoft.

I uninstalled it, a process which itself took 30 minutes or more.

Try it at your peril. Better still, don't.

I have Evolution on Linux - Very Good. For mobile reasons I had to go with Laptop and Windows 7 32bit. Evolution for Windows is a No-Go. It starts OK exchange store crash and as soon as you open a mail message, Evolution crash!
Problem - Can't get much needed e-mails out of Evolution. NOT GOOD

As the National Health Service (NHS) in England (1.3M employees) has cancelled its software agreement with Microsoft, a lot of organisations are looking at Open Source solutions. A lot of NHS IT is MS (Windows, SQL Server, Office, Exchange, Outlook, SharePoint ...) and all of it works, nearly all of the time. Do I need to say more?

I will anyway.

So here is an opportunity, and someone recently suggested Evolution to replace Outlook so I have been looking at it. If anyone thinks that a product like Evolution has potential, I have to ask over how long a term? I think there is a level of naive optimism going on here.

If it works well, in its limited way, on Linux that\'s great, but most organisations won\'t be able to migrate everything at at same time as that would be very high risk. So user applications wanting to take over the desktop need to work with the de facto desktop operating system (i.e. Windows), make more friends and be a bit less missionary.

I hope we, as an organisation are not forced to use software of this standard as the support costs will rocket. I do however hope that things change in the Open Source world as we need more genuine choice.

Sorry for the rant, but it\'s an honest view and I am at least \'Open\' minded e.g. Does it count that I love Foxpro (a much better story) and have an iPhone linked to Outlook.

I feel a little better now.

Currently Evolution for Windows is garbage. Windows 7 32 Bit - crashed immediately after install, and again after a re-boot.

Too bad about this release. Evolution in Linux is fantastic. The windows release is a piece of crap. I hope Evolution newbies don't get a false impression from this poor attempt to port Evolution to Windows.

Totally useless because it crashes all the time on Win 7 64 bit machine

I do not recommend this program.I installed it on Windows 7, and it seems to access my POP server, but it displays no emails. If I look at the directory it uses, I can find my emails, but I can find no way to display my in-basket. To make matters even worse, there is no support link on the company website, and the Contact Us link doesn't work. There is no help or support. If it wasn't for the fact that it has gobbled up my email and stores it, even if I can't read it yet, I'd drop it like a hot rock.

Is this supposed to be evolution. Yes? Well then outlook 2003 is simply SENSATIONAL. For a start M$ test the product cause it works in windows xp. Evolution is not tested, as it comes up with lots & lots of storage errors...no it's not my hdd! WHAT! 400MB chowed for just an email client! No wonder it is also dog slow to start up & chows 50% of cpu resources. GOSH, if this is the best gnu email client that people can come up with guess I'll be outlooking all my days.

Sad. Being a linux user who likes evolution I thought that this could help leverage some clients away from windows dependence.
Thunderbird + lightning does not make a good calendering experience.

Testing this product, it feels like an alpha port. Slow, unstable, and totally unacceptable for any production environment.

Sigh, that leaves office :-(

I also had high hopes for Evolution and was disappointed. Features that work fine in Linux versions do not work with the Windows version. Simply previewing a HTML formatted message will crash this mail client. Exchange connector is non-functional. The install size, memory footprint and CPU usage is unacceptable.

I will however follow the progress of Evolution. It looks great and if it can successfully be ported to Windows, I will use this program.

Wow, aparently people got something of this to work on Windows. Amazing! I never got that far. When the wizard tries to authenticate to the exchange server, it just hangs and that's about it.

Too bad, I run it on Linux as well, and there it just works like a charm.

It looks beautiful, but it never works for more than 2 or 3 minutes before it begins locking up or closing down. Takes forever to install (even with the installer) and takes forever to remove. I hope the folks producing it get it figured out. It looks like it has potential.

One of the questions in the evaluation is value for the price....even though it's free, it's not even worth that if you can't use it.

36 hours to import a 6 MB .pst file and completely unstable. I can't read three e-mails in a row without it crashing on Windows 7 64 bit.

An outlook killer this is not until it's actually stable. I see potential, but I am so far disappointed.

Like others, I had high hopes as I use Evolution on several Linux boxes (except for exchange support which has never been stable). After just setting up a simple IMAP account the program started crashing randomly. Add Google calendar to the mix and the program was completely unusable. Similar results on XP 32bit and Win7 64bit. With so many other mail clients to choose from this one has a long way to go before it can be considered. Some have called it a 'beta'. I might call it alpha-dev at best and a waste of HD space at worst...

Uninstall takes forever (still running) and hopefully I'll be able to find all the crap it leaves behind on the file system. I'll check again if they make it to a 3.x version - maybe by then this will be a decent product.

This is one seriously buggy piece of work. Slow to set up, crashed repeatedly on both XP and W7. It has a huge disk footprint with hundreds of subfolders and dependencies that took up nearly half a gigabyte of disk space -- absurd for an email program, "Outlook Killer" or not. Worse, when I finally got fed up and went to uninstall, it (a) took nearly 15 minutes and (b) left all sorts of detritus behind that had to be removed manually. I had high hopes after a good first impression on Ubuntu, but this Windows port is simply unusable. Hopefully the developers will work out some of the kinks in the next version

I love this on my linux computer...so I want it also on my Windows computer. I get this to work great for my MS Exchange server emails, but I can't get it to work for my live.com emails. I get tons of errors. It's of no use to me if I can't get it to work with everything. Has any one using Windows actually gotten this to work?

I have used Evolution on Ubuntu for a couple years, and recently went to port my e-mail backup from the linux version to the Windows version. I selected the tar.gz file, and a command window flashed for a second... but nothing happened.

Can the Windows version restore settings from a backup of the linux version? It almost seems like it doesn't know how to extract a tar.gz file on Windows.

I use Evoulution in Ubuntu and Fedora, it is GREAT!!! My main email service is gmail, I like gmail's interface, but when I am at home or office, I would like to have a nice GUI. I used Outlook with IMAP, it is okay, but I could not see neither my Gmail calendar nor Gmail contacts. Yes you can use third party tools to sync them, but then I "discovered" Evolution in Linux, I can read my gmail email (via IMAP), I can see my Gmail calendar, I can see my Gmail contacts, what else can I ask for? IT IS GREAT!!!,

So I tried the Windows version, why did I bother. I got ALL the errors others mention here, it is REALLY BAD!!!. I Will wait until a tested and working version is released. In the mean time, i will kee[p on using Evolution in Linux.

Potentially an Outlook killer but still has some major bugs. No help files and many errors with mime types.
Hopefully these glitches will be addressed

It does not start in Windows starter on my notebook.

Using version 2.26.2 under vista home premium 32 bit, and most of the issues seem to be fixed. Kinda. I needed an alternative to outlook, and decided to give this a shot. It connected to my exchange server using the OWA. T-Bird only let me receive email via pop/imap and not send it. Menu bars and all that still have to be added manually and the help file is non existant,, but it isn't crashing and setup was fairly straightforward. Still a lot of work that needs to be done, but it looks like someone made some improvements.

This is damned too sloooowww. Looks great on paper but very disappointing at use. Modules running in background crashes you don't know why. The thing keeps running but you really have to be patient. It reminds me running OS/2 on a PC/XT with 4MB RAM (where it needed 8 at least).
The most annoying: "Formatting message". How can you make users waiting for 2 minutes just displaying a simple HTML message?
Those who ported that thing on Windows probably had good intentions. But before releasing this to public, they should have improved the performances.
I'll look for another alternative to TBird.

Installed Okay. Tried to launch the thing and it froze on me. Killed the application then restarted. Managed to get the GUI up, but was missing it's tool bars. Manually added the tool bars and then attempted to set up an account. Error messages every second. Regular crashing. Gave up and uninstalled. This Software is not practical to use at all. It is really more Alpha state software and certainly can not be relied upon in any professional capacity.

How to get backup from Linux to woken in the program. In Linux, I will file / backup settings, and create a file to me, "evolution-backup.tar.gz,,.
So far everything is OK, but does not set woknech / reset. Advise me someone. e-mail dejmon@atlas.cz. Thank you very much.

It installs bot dpes not work at all in my XP laptop

I Use Evolution under Ubuntu Linux and it is a nice application. Not really sure what the point of the Windows version is.

As others have said there are huge problems even getting it to run on Windows XP SP3. Various things missing/don't work/require manual intervention/guess work. No documentation. No bug reporting. No listed system requirements or dependencies.

For free software it's way too expensive for what it does.

The Windows XP version of evolution is simply unusable. It is a shame as it would be an excellent replacement for outlook. Evolution works seamlessly on Ubuntu. Too bad the windows version is so flawed.

Download and install was without problems.

Performance was a disappointment. It automatically picked up one email account and reported a "send and receive" without any error . But without the password it got nothing from the server.

After a proper setup, the email handling both from the POP account and the IMAP account was satisfactory.

Attempts to import contacts (from a Thunderbird file), or calendar (from GMAIL) resulted in a cluster of error messages and left me with a distinct lack of confidence in the package. Much as I would like to use Evolution in both Windows and Linux, for the time being it seems to be Linux only.

To use an old teacher's comment "There is scope for improvement"

Works well, but not out of the box. Have to manually configure preview, sidebars, etc. Also, in Vista 64 an error occurs on start up that the Evolution-Exchange-Storage.exe has stopped working. Clicking Close the Program works and allows Evolution to continue with problems.

Also, no links work and have to manually copy them to Firefox. Evolution states no program assosciated with this action, but there is no place to set the program. Very frustrating!

installed on XP SP3, mail no problem. However, import terminates with an error message. Links towards the net (Firefox) dont work, and give an error message.
A pity, because otherwise I like it quite a bit.
Reto

I've read about this program and its features, decided to give it a go. Setup was flawless, but then... well, this program is very unstable, pretty slow and for some reason, when you start it all the needed gui elements like sidebar and buttons (giving you access to calendar) are hidden - you have to manual enable them from the top menu. Evolution under Windows will display error messages every few minutes... well, in current state it is unusable - treat it as BETA version.

Program downloaded and installed fine. Very slow initial startup; then crashed regularly ("Program not responding" messages). Regularly gave an error - "..exchange.. has ... and must shut down". After several restarts seemed to function - e-mail downloaded and sent; calendar events from e-mail; transferred to calendar; e-mail senders added to address book. Regularly had slow e-mail opening with "formating message" note, however sometimes worked well, without the "formating" delay.
Excited to find an alternative to Outlook, but crashes too frequent and runs too slow. Looked for a FAQ to tell me if I could turn some features off to fix - could not find. Tried myself - no improvement. Uninstalled.

Wonderful to use in Ubuntu Jaunty but hell on the work XP lap top, Cant do a file transfer from one to the other. What use is that, I need my calendar and data base every where.
So there's no point using it anywhere.
Once the Linux community understands most people dont have time to be computer engineer just to do stuff on the computer they will rule the world.

I downloaded and installed 2.26.2-1 15 minutes ago, and some issues are fixed.
Took a long time to load.
The DOS window is gone now and the icon works.
Correctly imported my accounts from version 2.24.
It recovered a message that I was composing when 2.24 crashed on me, but I was unable to continue editing it once recovered. I could not dismiss the recovered email and had to crash Evolution to get rid of it.
When composing a new message, you don't get the text cursor in the body of the message until you begin typing. (Could have been the problem above - can't remember if I tried to type on it)
Opening a message takes a LONG time. Stuck with a "Formatting Message..." When it finally opened, clicking on reply sent me back to wait hell. Ok, this is too slow to be useful.
Don't bother.
Spell checking now works and once turned on, checks in realtime. I had to add words like "I" and "a" to the dictionary already but otherwise it works well.

Unlike others here I downloaded and installed on XP SP3 and in less than ten minutes later was reading from the 1,793 emails that are stored on my Webhosts email server.

Whats the Batch file running at launch? I smell duct tape outta the box....

Importer was biased towards Unix and pretty lame for Windows (Elm? Pine? I think not). Accounts - I can setup my five email accounts in a few minutes. Contacts - no import from MS Products or Thunderbird, not looking forward to that.

Calendar... drool! Makes Lightning for Thunderbird looks like what is is, lame.

Contacts - um can't create a new contact. Either I'm an idiot or this is mega fail. "New - Contact" does nothing for Personal address book nor for a new Local test address book.

Oh well, back to T-Bird and Outlook 2007

There is an obvious problem with the installer package since I have tested it in three different Windows computers and it does three different things, none of them is running the client so that you can use it. It is very disappointing since the client on Linux is great.

I had the same problem like everybody else Evolution would not start, Found out that msvcr71.dll was not found. Probably a path problem in my language version (Swedish). I simply searched for it on my HD and copied the file tom my Evolution directory. Evolution stared fine but be calm. It takes quit long time the first time.

I've used Evolution on Ubuntu, so I was looking forward to using this on Windows also. However, it installed on Windows XP SP3, but never worked. Like ERW, all I ever saw was DOS window flash open and then close. I uninstalled, but this took so long I was wondering if the uninstall was going to crash.

Installed on XP Pro, SP3 - Never saw the GUI, Never saw any of the FEATURES, Never got to USE it, PRICE/VALUE = 0 - OVERALL RATING = 0. Appeared to install without any problems but it never ran. A DOS window would flash and disappear and then nothing - Nothing ever started and unstalling was painful slow! Will stay with Thunder Bird both XP and Linux/Ubuntu.

Having used Evolution on Linux and preferring it to Outlook I decided to try it out. Install went smoothly (XP - SP2 - 64 bit) but transferring your old "mail" is a Thunderbird step. Even worse that's all you can import, you loose all your settings. In fairness, getting all the email accounts setup was reasonably simple but loosing all the filters is a pain!

There's no way that I could find to report bugs in this version but here's what I found in the "top list".

1/ Occasionally (happened twice in 24 hours) there was an email it reported as "bad". This totally stopped all downloading of emails. I had to open up Outlook to get that email downloaded and cleared from the server. (Never saw this once on Linux) (I've never seen an issue with Outlook, Thunderbird or Squirrelmail.)

2/ The Spam filter does not work even though my emails clearly have the two triggers in them that this needs to move into the "junk" folder automatically.

3/ Deleting folders requires a re-start of Evolution and then go to the .evolution folder and clean up 3 or 4 other files related to folders by hand.

4/ Dreadful error messages that give no clue as to what is wrong. (Never had these messages on Linux).

5/ Still hooked into Bug Buddy for reporting bugs, does not work on Windows.

6/ After the installation I was unable to delete emails or folders. Discovered that the .evolution folder was marked "read only". had to turn that off to get things working semi-correctly.

My Conclusion is that it's really close but until my numbers 1 and 2 are fixed just a no go. There's no way I can have an email tool where I need to go to the server to find a bad email.


I don't know if this is ever read by the developers of Evolution, but if someone can tell me how to post a bug report(s) I will.

On windows XP sp2 this didn't even run after installation. Click on the evolution shortcut in the start menu and...nothing...at all. After some playing around, I was able to determine that it was failing because msvcp71.dll and msvcr71.dll were missing. You know what would have been nice? ...yes, some notification would have been SUPER. Afterwards, it still didn't run. After killing the application and restarting...oh no, not from the icon, mind you--that doesn't work...but directly from the .exe itself I finally got a gui. I'm supposed to consider this application as an alternative to Outlook? No thanks...not for my clients. They deserve stuff that works.

Both the Win and the Linux Version are maybe good & easy to use for an usual user (whoever this may be) but it lacks things other software like Thunderbird provides, like SSL Client Cert Support, Port Configuration of Imap / Pop3 / Smtp Connections and at all, a useful error protocol. Specially this Win version is really in need of it.
Also, when closing the app the shipped background services tend to keep running.
At all - not useable yet, Thunderbird is much more superior, also on *unix

need to be more stable, connectivity is excellent. Need a password protection to achieve confidentiality. otherwise an excellent effort.
Only time will tell if a linux app can be adapt to run under winXp.
keep up the good work, ...love it !

Evolution for Linux has been a life saver for me, however, my business laptop is Windows. Evolution does not work well in Windows since it frequently stalls or dies completely when trying to connect to Exchange porting through OWA. If it worked well, I would gladly pay for the app.

easy install and configuration. I don't see a spell checker but haven't checked add ons. I wasn't able to get it to work with Exchange. I'm using VISTA and receieved an error in ntdll.dll everytime I authenticated against the OWA server.

Program has potential, but does not work on Windows XP SP2 very well. Will not import from Outlook (must use CSV files). Should import from Thunderbird, Outlook and others directly without conveting to files. Takes up alot of resources. Task list shows approx 4-5 services/programs running. Needs alot of work. Linux version is very well done and works great (Unbuntu 8.04)

I found it VERY disappointing. I tried the previous release which would not run and I installed the current release today and that will not run either. The previous release gave a brief welcome screen and then died amidst a welter of error messages. The current release merely give a DOS box and then dies leaving an error message behind. I have used it successfully, and even began to like it, in Ubuntu where it runs without problems but the Windows version is, for me, a complete waste of time. Uninstalling it took nearly 10 minutes and I won't bother to try the next release if there is one. I would give Evolution for Windows 0/10 for everything.
Come back Thunderbird - all is forgiven!

I don't understand what T.S. Mathews is ranting about. This is a 100% free programme (GNU). I downloaded it straight from the mirror site, and it took no more than 4 minutes to download. 10 minutes after starting to search for the programme on the net, I was running it on my Windows Desktop. So far, it seems great, but I think I need to spend some time playing with it to provide an honest rating.

I've spent the past half hour trying to get Evolution so I could evaulate it but it seems the developer is only kidding about selling the product. I've found one site which offers a demo but, after asking for it, I find they'll get back to me in twenty four hours. Found this site and discovered I apparently have to use Bittorrent it I want to get Evolution. Seems to me one must beg to use the product. I've never--in over twenty years of computer use--had such a problem in trying to get someone to sell me something.