[Evolution] Folder-specific settings - why I can't give up Gnus yet

[Kirk Strauser <kirk strauser com>]

Evolution is terrific, and I've been using it increasingly more over the
last few weeks for calendaring, task management, and as an address book
(interacting with LDAP).  However, the email system lacks one thing
that's keeping me from switching to Evolution for everything:
folder-specific settings.  In Gnus (my current mailer of choice), you
can modify pretty much any setting on a folder-by-folder basis, and
those settings become the default for operations on the current folder. 
This is wonderfully useful in the situation where one email account is
used for multiple disjoint purposes.  For example, suppose that you use
Evolution in a corporate setting.  You have a fair amount of
intra-office communication, subscribe to a few mailing lists, and handle
some tech-support email.  Further imagine that you have a seperate email
address for each of these roles - one for talking to coworkers, another
for communication with the outside word, and one for answering those
support mails (because you *never* want to give an end-user your real
email address, right? :).

In Gnus, this is a snap.  You'd filter each of those mails into a
seperate folder, and give each folder a different outgoing email
address.  Want to GPG-sign email, but with different keys depending on
roles?  Piece of cake.  Want one signature for internal email, but a
different one for mailing lists?  It's a snap.  Visiting a folder for a
mailing list and want to start a new thread?  Simply start a new email,
and Gnus auto-populates the To: line based on the folder you're in (if
applicable).  Want to have a project-specific folder where your response
to an email gets saved in the folder itself automatically, your boss
gets Cc:'ed, and you don't want a signature at all?  That setup would
take about 10 seconds to create.

I'd *really* love to see Evolution get this functionality as well, but I
don't have any experience as an application developer (or the free time
to start with this particular undertaking).  However, I think that the
goal of having folder-specific settings should be as straightforward as
adding a way for the user to modify variables associated with each
folder, and accepting those variables as overrides to the global
settings.  For instance, from the examples I gave above, I might create
these folders with specific overrides:

Internal:
   From-address: me local region company com  (from a list configured in
the email accounts editor)
   Signature: "My boss is..." (configured from the email Settings
editor)
   Signing-key: GPG:"internal"

External:
   From-address: me company com
   Signature: "My opinions are not those of my company..."
   Signing-key: GPG:"external"

Tech-support:
   From-address: support company com
   Signature: "For more information, visit our site at..."

Big Project Foo:
   Cc: boss local region company com
   File-replies-here: Yes

Evolution Mailing List:
   From-address: me company com
   To-address: evolution ximian com


What does everybody think?  Does this seem like a reasonable thing to
hope for?
-- 
Kirk Strauser <kirk strauser com>