Re: [Evolution] Local store for IMAP accounts

[Richard Zach <rzach ucalgary ca>]

> The code still needs some work :-/

Yes.  I had to use evolution over a dialup line for a few weeks, and it
wasn't the best user experience.

1. The "work offline" state is not persistent. If you go to "work
offline", then exit evolution, then start up again, it'll be in online
mode.  That means, you can't start evolution (and work offline) without
bringing up the ppp link first.  If there's no network connectivity,
evolution should perhaps go into offline mode anyway, regardless of
wwhether you were offline when you last exited or not.

2. I haven't figured out when this happens, but every so often,
evolution will query the server for the headers of the entire inbox
(it'll say "opening folder", "downloading header information for new
messages" etc in the status line. In the process, it loses all the
cached messages; when you go offline now you can only look at the
messages that you've opened/previewed since evolution rescanned the
folder.

3. The last (most recent) message in the folder is not avaliable
offline.  Get a new message, select it so it shows in the preview pane,
then go offline. Now select another message (which is cached), then the
most recent one again and you get a "not available" error.

4. There's no way to make sure that you have a message cached locally
other than opening it.  In particular, there's no way to say "download
all messages" or "download the messages I've selected".

5. I found it annoying that you can't go offline without first
rescanning all your imap folders (when evolution closes the
connections), and also that there's a dialog first where I have to
acknowledge that evolution is now going to do that.  When I'm done
reading my mail and I'm ready to close the ppp connection, I want to be
able to do that immediately (remember, in other countries you still pay
for your phone usage by the minute; or you might be on the road and
calling your local isp long distance from the hotel).  When I click
"work offline" I don't want to wait another couple of minutes until
evolution's finished closing the connections; if I want to make sure
that there are no new emails I can do a "send/receive" before I go
offline.

-R
-- 
Richard Zach ...... http://www.ucalgary.ca/~rzach/