Re: [Evolution-hackers] RFC: Check for mail only in subscribed folders.

[David Woodhouse <dwmw2 infradead org>]

On Thu, 2004-01-08 at 10:12 -0500, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> What if I want to show only subscribed folders but only want evo to
> check a subset of those subscribed folders?

That's another reasonable feature request.

> > It seems to make sense.
> 
> it's a hack.

The implementation's a hack, indeed. The concept is sane enough.

My IMAP server contains only mail folders -- all are visible.

Only some of these folders are 'active' and have mail delivered to them.
Many are archive folders which are present merely for the occasional
search, or for lists to which I'm no longer subscribed, etc.

In accordance with RFC3501 I have told the server which of my folders
are 'active' by subscribing to them. That's what section 
6.3.6 of RFC3501 says. 

It find it really useful for Evolution to notice which folders I've
marked as active, and to refrain from checking the inactive folders for
new mail.

I really can't think of any other possible meaning of 'active' in this
context -- can you?

> If you want to make it so that evo can be set to only check a subset of
> folders for new mail, I'd rather see a way to pick folders independent
> of subscription status.

That's a reasonable feature to ask for, and it's fairly easy to do --
all you have to do is keep a list of 'active' folders in the Evolution
config, and we even have dialog boxes we can reuse to manage it.

It's not quite as nice as letting the IMAP server keep track of which
folders are active, but there's no reason we shouldn't allow the user to
do _either_.

How about a setup where we allow the user to explicitly select (with a
dialog box like the subscriptions one) which folders are:

  - visible
  - periodically checked ('active')
  - shown in the summary, panel, etc. ('monitored')
  - offline folders

For each of the above lists, the user should be able to choose 'all
folders' 'no folders' 'subscribed folders' or 'explicitly chosen
folders'. In both the latter two cases, the user gets to play with the
dialog box and choose folders, and it only affects where the list is
stored.

In my case, I'd have 'visible == ALL', 'active == SUBSCRIBED', and would
explicitly list two or three folders in the 'monitored' list.


-- 
dwmw2