Checking your e-mail just like you did with Outlook

If you are new to my blog site, I am in the middle of a series on how to switch from Windows to Linux. I am not a Windows basher by nature and by my nature I will continue to use Windows as well as Linux and to a small extent Macintosh.
About three months ago I noticed that my Microsoft Outlook 2003 kept freezing up on me and become unstable. I tried upgrading to Outlook 2007, but the problems kept persisting. I couldn't find any help at Microsoft or much help online. All I really wanted to do is get my Gmail through IMAP, and have a handy dandy calendar open at the same time.
I had a few options available...

1. suck it up and keep working with outlook
2. check my g-mail with the website and start using a calendar google provided
3. start using thunderbird and do without a calendar
4. other

I decided on the other option. I already had Ubuntu dual booted (as I still do) and decided to see what was going on there. What I found was the default e-mail client Evolution. I was a little doubtful as I shamefully always am, but what I found was a full featured e-mail client with all the tools I was already looking for.

• POP and IMAP support
• HTML message capable
• A calendar with day / week / month views with an event alarm feature
• To-Do tasks
• RSS feed reader

Importing my G-mail account was easy. I could have went to the g-mail homepage and probably found instructions there, but instead I did a google search and found a fellow blogger that has a wonderful step by step tutorial on setting up g-mail with imap. You can find the article on Victor's blog.

NOTE: if you are trying to set up multiple g-mail accounts using IMAP you will probably run into problems because your computer can only sign into one g-mail account at a time. I got around this annoying problem by having my different account all forwarded to my main account.