Gnome evolution:

Actually, this was triggered by clicking a mailto: link, whilst I hadn’t fixed Gnome’s default behaviour of launching evolution, so I just closed the mail dialog Window, but evolution seems to insist on staying running persistently.

But I don’t even use this freaky program. I only configure my Google Calendar to have it show up in the date app in gnome-panel. I may have an IMAP account configured too, but I don’t really use that.

I can understand that having an IMAP account with several gigs of data on the server end might trigger some indexing magic, but why evolution insists on permanantly using half of my physicical memory is beyond me.

This behaviour has actually been very persistent since several years/releases. Even deleting al .evolution related data in $HOME doesn’t fix that, so it’s not some left over garbage from an old installation.

How to reproduce? Clean install. Configure a calendar. Configure an imap account. Rince & repeat.

How such a piece of junk manages to stay the default client of choice in Gnome, and hence lots of distributions, is beyond me.