[Evolution] Evolution integration and Wishlist/Buglist

["David A. Desrosiers" <setuid linuxcare com>]

        I've been playing with Evolution (as many of you already know)
since before the word was even "public". Lots has improved, and I'm very
impressed with the speed of it's progress. Kudos to everyone involved. 

        As a person who receives a *LOT* of mail every day, about 80% of
which requires my personal response, I have to jump in to add my .02 cents
here to the list of ideas, bugs, and other things to chew some synapses
on. (Dan Winship and I have spoken about some ideas in irc already) 

        1. [Wish] The ability to add custom headers to the outgoing
           messages, either on a per-message basis, or globally. Have some
           static headers, and then the ability to edit them out, or add
           additional ones, runtime, while composing messages
           (Message->Properties?). I've got custom headers in most of my
           messages now, with pine (still the most powerful MUA I've ever
           used to date). It's a no-brainer to do there, so I'm sure it
           can't be too hard to do with E.

        2. [Bug] When dragging an item to the shortcut bar, the default
           action is to switch to that item. Not exactly preferred when
           you're offline (such as my configured options for polling our
           ldap internal server for my vCard list(s)). Additionally, the
           shortcut never actually gets created on the bar, until I'm
           actually physically connected to the network. A simple fix. If
           you click and let go, the item should be selected. If you click
           and drag onto the Shortcut canvas, it should not transmit that
           click/drag to the option you're dragging.

        3. [Personal Wish] Integration with the Palm. This is of course
           being worked on from many sides, and building with --enable-oaf
           and building gnome-pilot with the same should in theory grant
           that access, but it's not quite "robust" yet. Adding a listener
           to the IDL for Evolution (as Eskil has suggested) might be an
           easy route, but the codebase and structures for Evolution have
           to stabilize or at least be abstracted with an interface which
           will deal with changes in some sane fashion. 
        
           Since I am making changes to pilot-link which will ultimately
           affect how gnome-pilot and other reliant code operates (not to
           worry everyone, it will not break anything fatally) and I'm
           about to release 0.9.5 of pilot-link, this becomes more
           critical to have working sooner.

        4. [Bug] A lingering bug exists within the LDAP code. It was fixed
           at one point for about a week, then broke again, but ORBit and
           bonobo has changed beyond where I could have backrolled a patch
           into it to fix it. Chris Toshok knows about it, and we've
           tossed backtraces back and forth in irc as well. Nothing
           critical at the moment, but having a working LDAP
           implementation will allow me to do some other internal test of
           Evolution and integrate it with some other ideas I've got (not
           to mention it allows me to sync my internal LDAP employee list
           with my palm).

        5. [Wish] Some sort of back-end integration with a shared calendar
           or group calendaring solution. I highly recommend something
           like OpenFlock (again Dan and I have spoken about this too) for
           a start. It's extremely flexible, does everything we'll need
           now, and will probably need in the future, and it comes with
           everything we need to make it work _TODAY_. I've already been
           prototyping a palm application which will work with it, talking
           both locally to OpenFlock at the desktop level (desktop
           conduit) as well as to a remote server (ala SyncML), which
           would eventually be an Evolution Server of some capacity, which
           could be queried for appointments, etc. The other beauty of the
           OpenFlock solution is that you can use ssh, telnet, etc. to
           change/view/edit/create/delete your appointments or those of
           others.

           The other benefit of a solution like this is that I can use my
           iPAQ to retrieve my mail over my Lucent card, wireless, and not
           break my desktop's ability to use Evolution. (Yes, I could also
           do some advanced interface for Evolution for the iPAQ, and slim
           it all down, but that's just too much for a PDA to handle, esp.
           with the limited space of the unit, and the increased space
           requirements and libraries that Evolution needs to function
           properly.) I'm only speaking mail here, but for something like
           the iPAQ, using gnomecal + OpenFlock to Evolution may be a
           better possibility than trying to port Evolution to the iPAQ. I
           know Jim Getty's is already going down this path.

        6. [Wish] I know this is on everyone's wishlist, so I'll just
           repeat it with some elaboration. There's going to be a desire
           to use some advanced filtering (ala procmail). I have about 70
           recipes in my rc.folders for procmail, and without them, I'd be
           drowned in a 2+ meg Inbox daily. Not ideal. What is being done
           in this area, if even at a first pass, it's simply a hook to
           procmail for Evolution-based editing of those recipes?

        7. [Wish] Something "That Other Client(tm)" has.. The ability to
           "proxy" against someone else's calendar/inbox/etc. Basically a
           secretary scheduling appointments or answering mail on behalf
           of her boss. Alternate solution is the ability to "publish"
           your calendar to a shared area, which can be read by {0..n}
           recipients, based on a configuration (an LDAP lookup of people
           who you wish to authorize to see this material?) You could then
           have icons on the shortcut bar which lead you to either that
           shared area, or to another user's calendar/inbox in full.

        8. [Bug] Possible bug here, if not a wishlist item. When creating
           mail filters, the ability to double-click to edit the filter.
           Doesn't exist yet, but I'm sure it's an easy fix.

        9. [Wish] The ability to "Run a Filter" interactively. If you have
           200 messages in your inbox (or any folder for that matter) and
           have a filter created, and want to either test it, or re-run
           that filter on your mail folder, immediately. Doesn't exist
           yet, but would be a nice option.

       10. [Wish] Again, mail filters: The ability to "Lodge/Dislodge" a
           filter (enable/disable) from use. You may want to have some
           rules active when you're on the road, for example (or in a
           hotel) and not while you're in the office, and vice-versa.
           Perhaps the notion of "Profile Based Logins" to Evolution?

       11. [Bug] Why is there a "Mark as Unread" option in the Edit menu
           of the Contact's vCards? There's also a "Paste Special" there
           as well. Granted, they are FIXME options, but I hope the FIXME
           part means they're getting yanked from the interface. It's also
           not immediately intuitive that a double-click on the canvas
           will create a new Contact card. Perhaps something watermarked
           on the white canvas might give the "Joe User" a bit more
           clues. There's a New button, and when there are *NO* vCards,
           the "Double-click" message pops up, but... =)

        
        That should do for now... I'm going to keep beating up the code in
several dozen scenarios and see what I can cause it to happen.



-D23



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