Re: [Evolution] Does Evolution really need to be so terribly bad?

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> I discovered Evolution because it comes with Fedora and I must say I
> now truly loathe this program but maybe I am just too stupid to use it
> in which case I am willing to be taught the right way.

It's not compulsory to use Evo - if you don't like it, don't use it!


> It has mainly to do with the way emails are stored. For me it is
> important to save messages on my PC for future reference otherwise I
> would just use my provider's online facility but that sadly deletes
> emails after a certain period of time. The first thing I noticed was
> that emails that have been deleted are moved to Trash as should be but
> from there individual deletion of emails is not possible any more as
> only the entire folder can be purged. I accepted that as silly yet not
> crucial so I undeleted all my emails and started to sort those that I
> wanted to archive in a separate folder.

It's one thing that has always confused me: why do people delete emails
when what they actually mean is "I've done reading this email now, I
might want to come back to it later".  I mean, if you put something in
the trash at home and then kept it in a big heap in your sitting room
just in case you need it, it would be pretty odd!

>  All fine and dandy I thought. The only problem was that by some
> unexplainable magical twist in hell's master plan some of my emails
> reappeared in the trash folder although I had not deleted but moved
> them into my shiny new archive folder.

"Move" is implemented as "copy" followed by "delete".  Hence the emails
are marked as deleted and appear in the Trash folder.  There are many
reasons for this is including security (there is no time that the
message is not there, hence Evo will never totally loose your email) and
the fact that some of the underlying mail storage mechanisms don't have
primitives to do a move.

>  Mightily confused I undeleted all those emails again only to find out
> that it caused those emails to be duplicated, I believe!? The end of
> the story is that I have loads of duplicated emails all over the
> place, have lost all track of pretty much everything and as a
> consequence am now so highly frustrated that I had to sit down and
> write these lines.

As some OP said, turn off the "Hide Deleted Emails" and it will become
more obvious what's going on - and also remember that emails are never
actually deleted (until purged), they are marked as deleted and the
trash folder is just a virtual list of those messages that are so
marked.

> Gosh, Evolution has really done my head in, and I actually do like
> Darwin's ideas. I suggest the name be changed to something more
> suitable, how about Mail Muncher?
> I acknowledge my lack of sophisticated knowledge of PC software and
> Evolution in particular however I suggest that if even I manage to
> mess things up so quickly you guys better change the way the program
> works.

As I said above, it's because you are using Trash folders and email
deletion in a strange way - the Evo developers, quite rightly in my
opinion, assume that when you press the delete key, you want to delete a
message.

P.