Re: [Evolution] Filter question

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On 21 May 2001 11:22:40 -0700, Matt Nelson wrote:
> You should re-consider your priority for this feature.  It makes Evo 
> nearly unusable for people who use IMAP and subscribe to several mailing 
> lists.  Here is a rundown of my email use:

This feature is one of the next things Dan will be implementing from
what I understand. Currently he's working on disconnected IMAP.

>   - subscribed to many mailing lists
>   - depend on email for important business communications
>   - have email client "automatically check" for new mail so that 
> business-related messages don't go unnoticed.
>   - filter out list-related messages so my Inbox should only contain 
> business mail, and will be quickly noticed when it arrives.
>
> I doubt that the above is an unusual use of email.  In fact, I suspect 
> that it is very common.

I would agree that that is pretty common, that describes my mail setup
as well.

> Without automatic filtering, the above is not really possible because 
> the Inbox is always cluttered so always demands attention.  I know that 
> I won't use Evo as long as automatic IMAP filtering is missing.

It is possible, you just need to setup server-side filtering. This is
what I did.

> BTW, was there a specific decision to exclude this functionality?  I am 
> a bit confused, because all other email clients I have used seem to 
> filter automatically.

There was not a specific decision to exclude this functionality at all.

You are quite a bit confused, there aren't many (if any?) mail clients
that filter IMAP mail unless they treat IMAP like POP, in which case
using IMAP is useless. If there is a client that does IMAP filtering
without treating IMAP as if it were a POP server, then I'd like to know
which one? I know Balsa, mutt, Netscape, Mozilla, pine, etc don't filter
IMAP mail.

I think you're thinking of mail clients that filter POP mail
automatically (which Evolution *does* do).

Filtering IMAP mail is not as easy as you would like to believe and in
most cases, filtering IMAP mail is tremendously SLOW because you'd have
to download the message, run your filter rules on it, and then append it
back to the server. Now just imagine, if you will, opening Evolution and
connecting to your IMAP server after you get back from a long vacation
when you get 500 emails per day? I'm sensing that you would then be
bitching that Evolution doesn't filter fast enough.

What you *really* want is server-side filtering. With some IMAP servers
this can be done using procmail on the server. To find out how you can
do server-side IMAP filtering with your account, you should contact your
administrator or someone who would know for sure.

Future plans:

There is a recent protocol (of which I forget the name) that defines a
means for an IMAP client send filtering rules to the IMAP server but as
far as I know, there are few (if any?) servers/clients that implement
this yet. We do plan on supporting this but probably not until after
1.0.

As another solution, we also plan on adding automatic filtering
capability to Evolution before 1.0, but do understand that this might be
slow and that these filters will NOT be applied when you connect using
another IMAP client like mutt or whatever.

Jeff

> Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
>
> > filters do not get applied to IMAP mail automatically because they are
> > not "downloaded" when you hit Send & Receive. We do plan on adding a way
> > to automatically filter IMAP mail at some point but I'm not sure when
> > this will happen.
> >
> > Jeff