Re: [Evolution] Sorely disenchanted with Evolution (looong)

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj ximian com>]

On Wed, 2002-06-26 at 22:24, Frank Gore wrote:
[snip]
> No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to ever be able to copy and paste
> things out of displayed emails in evolution (what some people call the
> "preview pane"). I've tried everything I could think of, but it never
> works. Shift-Delete, Ctrl-C, even Edit/Copy from the menu. None of it
> ever manages to copy anything. The only way I can ever get it to copy or
> cut text is if I hit Reply and copy the text out of the email editor.
> This is a HUGE drawback when I'm doing order tracking and need to
> quickly copy UPS tracking numbers into a spreadsheet or the browser.
> There's no way I'm gonna type hundreds of tracking numbers by hand
> everyday. And having to hit Reply to every email before I can copy text
> out of it is a pain. This has plagued me ever since the first 1.0
> release of Evolution. What am I doing wrong? Am I the only one with this
> problem?

The Copy/Paste menu items in Evolution 1.0.x were not hooked up to the
"preview pane", instead they were hooked up to the message list (for
copying messages from one folder and pasting into another).

I guess us old-school Unix hackers forgot that many people use
Copy/Paste for copying and pasting text selections around so we never
implemented it in 1.0.x. This has, however, been implemented in the
current development versions.

I think that selection a region of text *should* copy the text into your
X clipboard and then middle-clicking somewhere (like mozilla?) *should*
Just Work (tm) as that is how X's copy/paste clipboard works.

I'm not really sure because I don't have 1.0.x installed, but it works
for me in the development versions (I don't see any reason why it
wouldn't work in 1.0.x).

> Another issue is the fact that I can't get the cc and Reply-to to
> auto-fill with default values. I need this for almost every email I send
> out. Remembering to do it manually for each and every email is not only
> a chore, it's error-prone. I find myself forgetting too often. I've
> brought this up before and was told the CVS version had this feature,
> but as I mentioned above, I never got the CVS version to compile.

Yep, the CVS version has both of these and also an auto-Bcc entry.

> Along those same lines, I can never get Evolution to send from the right
> account. Once email has been received and filtered, it no longer seems
> to belong to any specific account, despite the fact that it's stored in
> seperate mail files on the hard drive. So when I reply to it, it's
> anyone's guess as to which account it'll be sent from. If my email
> address was in the To: of the original email, then it "usually" gets
> sent from that account, but that's not nearly good enough. Most of the
> email I receive isn't addressed to me, it's addressed to the company's
> customer service address. I can't be replying to customers using my
> personal account, nor do I want to be doing my private emailing from my
> corporate account. I realize that changing the From: account is a simple
> task, but I find myself forgetting to do it regularly and that's when
> trouble begins.

This should be at least somewhat improved in CVS as we now save the
account info from which the mail was downloaded from (assuming you use
POP at least) in an X-Evolution-Source header which the Reply code trues
to use to guess which account it came from.

> Ideally, the cc: and Reply-to: should auto-fill differently based on
> which account the email is being sent from. Now THAT would be awesome.

The CVS version allows you to configure a Reply-To and auto-Cc list on a
per-account basis, so this is also doable in CVS.


Unfortunately I have no idea what problems you are having trying to
compile CVS, so I can't really help you there. My guess is that you
probably are not upgrading some of the other dependency libraries that
Evolution depends on?


For example, to run Evolution CVS you need the following libraries:

soup 0.6.x  (suggest 0.7.x)
the CVS version of gal
the cvs version of gtkhtml
the cvs version of evolution


Hope that helps,

Jeff

-- 
Jeffrey Stedfast
Evolution Hacker - Ximian, Inc.
fejj ximian com  - www.ximian.com