Evolution – Fix Slow Performance When Sending Mail in Ubuntu 12.04

12.04evolutionimap

I'm fighting with Evolution. Basically it's working fine — but it is very slow to react in certain situations.

Helper questions

  1. Could it be that changing away from Bonobo has to do with slowing-down?

  2. There might be some trouble with the new engine and "asynchronous actions". What to do about it? Are there e.g. any configuration files?

  3. I want to get the previous "working mood" back. How can I speed this thing up?

Different scenarios

  • when sending a mail, the composer window hangs there inactive for a couple of seconds, everything grayed out (the bigger the message/attachments, the longer it takes). Though there is a green check mark saying it's sent, I'm not sure a) why it's still blocking everything and b) whether I could simply close it without "breaking"/"losing" anything. In earlier versions, the composer window was closing pretty fast, and one could see the message being stored into the local "outbox" until it was sent, and one could immediately continue with the next task. I prefer that behaviour over the current, where I cannot do anything in the application until the window closes.
  • switching between modules. Coming from mail and switching to the address book takes a couple of seconds. Same for switching to the
    calendar. I read about different "possible causes" and tried a few
    things:

    • I only have 3 local address books, so no networking should be involved here. To make sure, I switched to offline mode and then tried
      to access the address book. No noticeable difference.
    • I use 3 Google Calendars. Switching to offline mode made a minor difference, but so minor that it also could be "imagination" since one
      might have expected this in this case
    • according to some reports, disabling the tasks should help. Well, it didn't in my case, as I don't use them regularly (just two local items stored here)

Maybe I should also mention that I'm using the KDE4 desktop (so no Unity or Gnome, though both is installed on the computer). And I did not have this issue before I updated to 12.04.

Best Answer

While I did it for different reasons, it may help to upgrade to Evolution 3.4. Ubuntu intentionally remained on an older version of Evolution (and some other Gnome applications) for 12.04, due to insufficient testing. That said, I haven't had any of the issues you're describing.

Thanks to a helpful fellow AU member, I found the Stracciatella PPA, which has all the Gnome 3.4 stuff. Installing Evolution itself was pretty painless, though Ubuntu really doesn't want you to, so you have to tell it to do so explicitly.

  1. Add the repo: sudo apt-add-repository ppa:janvitus/gnomestracciatella
  2. Update apt (sudo apt-get update)
  3. Install Evolution (sudo apt-get install evolution)
  4. Remove or disable the PPA, so Ubuntu doesn't continue to complain that it can't update everything.
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