(LinuxWorld) -- Ximian Evolution 1.0 is a GNOME/GTK-based groupware application that sports e-mail contact management, to-do lists, and a calendar. With all of this hoopla from my fellow columnist Nicholas Petreley on the mutt e-mail client, (see resources below) I thought could I take the time to introduce a more useful client.

Okay, flame suit on. The mutt mail client is not bad. It is remarkably fast at dealing with large message lists, and is reasonably easy to learn, although not quite as easy as Pine. Besides, mutt (unlike Pine) is open source.

However, for those of us who are constantly barraged with people sending HTML-based e-mail and e-mail with attachments -- or are just tired of looking at a black and white screen all day -- Evolution is a welcome surprise.

For any of you who have read my articles in the past, you have probably picked up that I am not a GNOME fan, and therefore are wondering why I am running Evolution. The answer is simple: There isn't anyone in KDE land who has bothered to produce such a well-rounded, feature-rich e-mail client.

Yes, there is Aethera, but it isn't nearly as complete as Evolution, and TheKompany hasn't released any updates since July 2001. Oh, and for all you who think I should put my money where my mouth is, I did. When KDE 2.2 was released, I offered (as did a couple of other people) to pay any KDE developer to fix the IMAP problems in KMail. Nobody took us up on the offer.

Long story short: I run Evolution in KDE 2.2.2.

Is Evolution perfect? Of course not. It runs with the GTK toolkit! Seriously, though, Evolution does have a couple oddities, and incomplete features. For example, although Evolution supports IMAP and multiple accounts, it will not correctly use multiple SMTP servers. I tested this on two machines, and Evolution appears to use the default SMTP server only for sending mail.

Secondly, Evolution does not have a decent way of exchanging free/busy calendar information. Evolution does have an easy way to retrieve free/busy info, but if I want to publish my own data, I have to e-mail it.

Lastly, the contacts don't appear to use an LDAP server as the default address book. LDAP support is there, and you can use it. It is not, however, the primary source for address information.

Other than that, for a 1.0 release I am very happy with Evolution. I have been able to set up my PGP/GPG identities so that I can sign all my messages, and the filtering capability is great. I can set generic filters that immediately delete all e-mail that has a subject that contains, "Mortgage Rates," or if I click on a particular message I can choose, "Create Filter From Message."

One feature I found particularly interesting (I think I mentioned this before during a review of the beta version) was the VFolder concept. A virtual folder is a folder that is created from a series of other folders. For example, let's say that (like me) you archive your e-mail every month. However, you want to make sure that you keep certain customer e-mail always easily available. I don't really want to keep all e-mail in one physical folder because I would have a hard time reviewing 1,000 messages for relevant dates and times. By using VFolders, I can create a filter that create my 1,000-message folder, without actually moving the messages out of their designated monthly folders.

I also enjoy the threaded e-mail sorting. It takes a little bit of getting used to after using Pine for years, but the ability to read e-mail just like message boards is remarkably useful. I don't have to go back through 500 messages to find the one message my customer replied to 15 days ago. Instead, since it was a reply, it will automatically be placed within the mail thread. Threading is very nice.

Originally, I didn't like the initial summary page. It reminded me entirely too much of the fabled Outlook. Now as I use it, I find that it will pull threads from my favorite news sites. Don't want to fire up your browser to see the latest useless Slashdot post? Just click "summary" on the left-hand side of the Evolution screen.

I moved all of my e-mail to Evolution, and have been happy for two weeks. I no longer suffer through Pine, and the IMAP support is top notch. Gone are the oddities of KMail, which will check e-mail only once (even if you click check e-mail), gone are the days when I would have to save an attachment to my home directory and use scp to relocate the file to the office machine for viewing, and finally, finally! gone are the days of receiving winmail.dat files that are actually Outlook-based e-mails that Pine doesn't understand.

I think I will remain happily in Evolution land until someone either creates a similarly useful product for KDE (hurry up Aethera team), or someone ports the GTK-based Evolution to QT. Any takers on my original offer to the KDE developers?