After Installing Ubuntu, I was pleased to find out that it had my favorite web browser Firefox installed by default. Since Firefox allows users to manually configure proxy settings, I had no trouble browsing web. The second decision that I needed to make was to choose my default mail application. I used Mozilla Thunderbird on Windows but since Evolution came pre-installed with Ubuntu Breezy Badger 5.10 I decided to give it a try. The first thing I needed to know was how to configure it for my Gmail account. I found this tutorial. Followed the instructions but failed to fetch mail from my Gmail account.
Unfortunately Evolution e-mail client doesn’t come with a connection tab in Edit > Preferences. It gets connection settings from Gnome’s environmental settings which could be changed in System > Preferences > Network proxy. Evolution doesn’t get my connection settings and gives errors “No route to host or Network is unreachable”.
After a few attempts to find out a solution I gave up and installed my preferred mail client, Thunderbird. After installing Thunderbird, I had no problem configuring it for my Gmail account because I was already familiar with the interface, settings and it had the connections tab in Preferences under Edit menu. I can not understand why the same network settings work in Thunderbird and not in Evolution? When comparing both clients, Thunderbird surely lacks many features that Evolution offers but in my case I don’t need these features, I just need some application to fetch email from my account and Thunderbird does that perfectly.
