What is evolution mail?

[dmg1287]

Is it a email account like yahoo or google? Thanks.

[darkrose0510]

It's an email client like outlook.

[dmg1287]

I have never used outlook, only gmail, are you saying it will allow me to check my google mail account?

[darkrose0510]

Yes you can, you just need to find googles howto for enabling IMAP or POP access, then you'll be able to access/read/send google mail with evolution.

[techieMoe]

I have never used outlook, only gmail, are you saying it will allow me to check my google mail account?

Yes, you can use it for that. darkrose gave you a clue how. I'll take a moment to explain more about the program.

Evolution mail is a stand-alone email client that connects to a remote server and downloads your email to your local machine. This is the way all email used to be delivered, using either POP3 or IMAP protocols. It's sometimes called a "fat client" because the bulk of the application lives on your harddrive.

Recent inventions such as Gmail keep all your mail on their server and you access it via a "thin client" in your web browser. All your mail and the software that runs the client live on Google's servers.

There are pros and cons for both. Keeping your email on your local machine gives you access to it while offline, but unless you specifically tell Evolution to keep a copy on the server, you won't be able to access it from another computer using a web client.

Web clients give you the convenience of checking your mail from any computer but they only work when you have a reliable internet connection. Google is testing a beta application right now as part of their Gadgets program that kind of works both ways. It will download your mail to your local machine but keep in sync with the online server when you have internet.

[elija]

IMAP will access the messages from the server so they can be accessed from multiple clients. POP3 downloads the messages and can leave a copy on the server for retrieval on another client. I believe the web mail clients like GMail, Hotmail et alia are actually IMAP clients hooking up to the server.

[jmadero]

I'd personally suggest thunderbird over evo.....I don't like how much evo looks and feels like a Microsoft program.

There are several other options as well but evo and thunderbird are the two big ones I think

[oz]

Sylpeed and Claws Mail are a couple more good ones:

Sylpheed - lightweight and user-friendly e-mail client

Claws Mail - the email client that bites!