title: Evolution as a Gmail client link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/evolution-as-a-gmail-client/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 474 created: 2008/08/08 03:09:11 created_gmt: 2008/08/08 03:09:11 comment_status: open post_name: evolution-as-a-gmail-client status: publish post_type: post

Evolution as a Gmail client

Finally got this to work.

I have used gmail as my main e-mail account for a few years now. When they finally offered POP I wasn’t really interested because the convenience of having a remote mail store that didn’t have to be backed up, copied or synchronized outweighed whatever small benefit a fat client e-mail manager could provide.

Then came my recent interest in various security technologies, including gpg encrypted messages.

Since I use (non-IMAP enabled) MS Exchange at work, and primarily gmail for home, I needed a gpg-capable e-mail client that could connect to both — on Linux. Given those requirements the field narrowed pretty quickly and decisively in favor of Evolution, which has never been one of my favorite open source applications. Back in the day when I had tried it last it was nearly unusable.

While Evolution is still a bit clunky, and sometimes hangs for long periods while doing heaven-knows-what behind the scenes (recompiling BerkeleyDB hash files?), after a couple of weeks using it as my primary Exchange client I was comfortable enough to give it a try for gmail.

The basic configuration isn’t documented very well (the official Gmail instructions omit Evolution from the list of clients, and Evolution’s own documentation is, well, crummy). I found a post that put me on the right track.

Here’s my final setup.

First, the “Receiving Email” tab:

Next, the “Sending” tab:

The real trick to making this work, beyond making sure to use my fully qualified e-mail address for the user name, was twofold. First, while the IMAP server required an SSL connection, the SMTP server needs to be configured to use the TLS protocol. Second, and perhaps the one thing so badly documented by the Evolution team that it well might earn them a “Worst Persons” award if anyone outside of our little infotech community noticed, is that you must specify the port numbers of the mail servers in each dialog. So, when specifying the IMAP server name, “imap.gmail.com”, you actually need to have it read “imap.gmail.com:993”. Likewise, for the SMTP server you need to enter “smtp.gmail.com:587”.

There will be a test later on.

Important Update:

Almost a year later things have become much easier, at least as far as getting gmail up and running on evolution. With evolution 2.12, the current version on CentOS 5.3 you no longer have to specify port numbers for the IMAP or SMTP servers. Setting both to “SSL” works just as it should.

One new procedure I learned this time around was how to shutdown evolution and its data server within my user session. Previously I had to log out and then back in to effect certain changes (like configuring an LDAP address book). The handy command:

evolution --force-shutdown

when issued as the logged in user, after closing the evolution client, will completely and safely shut down any evolution processes associated with that user.

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo