On Sat, 10 Nov 2018 19:37:10 -0500 Yves Bellefeuille wrote:

I want to use Evolution because I want my mail client to use maildir rather then mbox. I used to use kmail, but that's no longer possible with CentOS 7.

You might want to look at Sylpheed. I use Sylpheed on my desktop and laptops, and mutt on my phone. I use fetchmail and procmail to pull and consolidate my mail from various servers, and all my mail clients talk to dovecot.

Whenever I try to receive or send mail, there's always a 90-second delay before the connection works. Since the delay is always exactly 90 seconds, I think I may be waiting for something to time out.

Perhaps this is a clue. My address is user@example.com. I have to log in to pop.example.com or imap.example.com as user, not as user@example.com. Evolution seems to always try to connect as user@pop.example.com or user@imap.example.com. I can't get it to try to connect as user. Perhaps it tries to log in incorrectly and gives up after 90 seconds, and then tries to log in correctly.

Evolution doesn’t “try” anything. It uses the login information entered when you set up the account - that information is also easily editable after the account is setup. There’s no guess work involved.

A timeout such as you are talking is possibly dns related - or it may be some artefact of the server.

I want to use Evolution because I want my mail client to use maildir rather then mbox. I used to use kmail, but that's no longer possible with CentOS 7.

I’m a fan of Evolution, but there are plenty of other things you can use if it doesn’t work for you and most can deal with maildir stores. BTW, unless you have a real specific need to use POP, it is generally better to use IMAP, and in that case what the mail client uses to store mail is not relevant since no mail is stored locally.

P.