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Re: [Evolution] Request for additions/corrections in Evolution

On Mon, 2002-05-27 at 09:54, Raider wrote:

Hello!

I'm a happy user of Evolution 1.0.2 on a MDK8.2.

Well... now I don't know if the developers are on this list or not.  If
they are - than maybe they can give me some answers like "this can be
done" "this is out of the question" "this should be out with the next
version".  If they aren't maybe the list can help me with some
oppinions.

My fist complaint (or did I miss something?) is that I want to use
another editor than the default.  How can this be done?

And here comes my list of problems with the editor.
1. There's no word wrap setting (not to my knowledge).  I'd be grateful
if somebody will point me that "missing" option.


it does word-wrap, what do you mean?


2. Related with the first one, there's no limit to the text...
"wideness".  It would be great to be a check box like "intelligent
resize" that will wrap text according to window lenght, besides the
normal "fixed" option.


please see http://www.jwz.org/doc/html-compose.html


3. A new line in an unwrapped quoted text leads to two newlines instead
of one.  And I have to edit by hand the extra newline.  Anyone knows
why?


huh? I've never seen this afaik.


4. There's only one type of "quotation".  So if I I have two levels of
quotation there's no change as Evolution doesn't know about it.


the development branch is much more smart about citations, maybe it will
solve whatever your problem is?


5. The "quotation" color is one of the most uninspired parts of
Evolution.  If I accidently delete a '>' sign, when I put it back it
will show up with the same color as my aditions... although '>' at the
beginning of a line means quote.


This is solved in the development branch afaik


6. Breaking lines manually from the quote will show them with the
quotation color, although this is false - to the person that will
receive that mail from the broken lines, only the first segment will be
shown as quote.  The rest will be... just text.


again, solved in CVS afaik


7. As an addition to the previous problem, actually a combination of the
previous two, if I manually add the '>' sign to the beginning of the
line it will show as normal text and the rest will be as quote.  I know,
one solution would be to turn this different coloring off.  But this
doesn't mean that part doesn't need improvement.


again, solved in cvs afaik


8. Again about quotes - from the reply, normally (and it makes sense) if
I want to break between line X and line X+1 to insert my comments it
will put just one newline.  This is weird as (see above) this would make
sense to give at least two newlines, a lot more than in the previous
sittuation.  Now, I've seen on other mail clients (no names) that a
newline would mean even three newlines, so my text would be clearly
isolated from the original text making things a lot more readable for
all, and especially for the guys who see it in plain text with no
colors.  Anyway, I do that, and I'd like to have this set by the mailer
and not push enter three times than press "up" once.


just hit return 3 times? that's what I do. some people may like only 1
return when they hit return. this is just you being lazy :-)


9. Evolution crashed on me only twice.  I don't complain about this as I
don't know what triggered the problem and I can't reproduce the
problem.  With this occasion I discovered that it can recover text.  Way
to go!  Great feature.  And it really saves time.  But, to my
dissapoinment it reformatted my text.  My replies go like this... quote,
newline, newline, tab, my text, newline, newline, quote.  With other
words my text is sepparated from the original text by one empty line
both before and after and I indent my paragraph with one tab.  Recovery
just removed the first empty line before my each insertion and it also
removed the tabs.
10. Back to the main issue - why not make it smart enough (the editor)
and understand that a newline in the quotation means break the line than
add a '>' to the beginning of the new line and put a space after it than
go on with the rest of the line.  And that the second newline means
keeping the things the way they were set and adding three (or two...)
empty lines than put the cursor on the second empty line. 
11. I see the editor has a hard time with highlighting addresses as
well.  It highlights even the '>' or the dot that belongs to the end of
phrase.

I have to add that I use only the "plain text" features as I don't plan
to use the HTML mails any time soon.

The filter problems:
1. The filters are quite limited.  There is only a global AND and a
global OR for all of the criterions of a rule.  I'm used to employ
procmail, and I have quite some problems implementing rules like:
(E1 OR E2) AND (E3 OR E4 OR E5)


you can always learn the filter expressions and use the "Expresion"
rule.


2. In case you don't come up with some type of grouping of the
criterions, why not make some "composite" rules.  I mean, so far if I
have two mailing lists to filter for "uninteresting" mails and for
offensive mails I'm lost.  For all simple rules "if... than" type I can
just choose "stop".  this is an excellent option as it speeds up the
process if you have many rules.  But I can't say
rule1: E1 OR E2 - action goto rule 14
rule14: E3 OR E4 - delete; stop.


this ain't gonna happen.


3. As an alternate, I see Evolution goes for "all in one pack", but how
can I plug in say procmail for processing incoming mail taken by
Evolution.  I see it keeps the mbox...


I've added a filter rule to pipe a message to an external program. You
can use the return code of the external program to base your filters on.
For example:

[Command][/usr/bin/my-filter][is greater than][5]


4. Am I missing something?  If I put 'To:' in the specific field my rule
would be ignored.  It will work only with 'To', no ':'.  Why?


because the ':' is not part of the header name?



The DNS problem.  If I'm online... send now and it is sent.  If I'm
offline and forget to check the offline mode I'm toast.  It will get
into a endless (or very loooong) loop and try to send that message. 
Same goes if I'm disconected - I'm on dial-up.  And reconnecting won't
help at all.  Can't it just "monitor" the connection.  Okay, say you
have a noisy line and the responses are slow... or... maybe you have a
2400baud modem ;-)  No problem.  But if I'm offline it makes no sense. 
And the problem becomes bigger if my line dropps for some reason as I
didn't see Evolution recover for the new connection (both identified as
ppp0! but different IPs for sure).


how do you propose Evolution monitor your internet connections? This is
not Win32 where you can just make an OS call to find out if you are
online or not. Nothing like that exists on Linux (or Unix period).



The above issue triggered two extra problems.

The connection problem: say I want to grab my mail.  For each connection
there is a cancel button.  Excellent.  With one small side problem - the
I can send mails via different relays, and all mails are put in the same
queue and I can't disconect only a certain relay (say the server is
overloaded and instead of being online for 5 minutes I can choose to go
online later for those particular mails).  Hmm... actually this seems to
be another problem.  So this should be entitled "the connection
problems".  Anyway, it's good to have those cancel buttons for every
connection even if they are only incoming connections.  But if I hit
send the mail will be delivered in the background.  If the server is
slow or it doesn't respond I can't cancel this action.  I searched and
found nothing that can kill/delay that send.


I think the global Stop button in the toolbar should do the trick?



Now... probably this was done with swiftness in mind.  But I don't see
it as a good feature.  What do I mean?  I hit send later... and the mail
will go to outbox, than, after sending to the sent mail folder.  Great. 
And configurable.  But if I hit send (as in send now) it will go...
suspended.  That message won't be anywhere till it getts send.  Or, if I
kill evolution it will go back as "recovered" message and the story
starts from the same point.  Why isn't the "send now" message copied to
"outbox" till the delivery process announced the mail is on its way? 
The last two problems combined with the reformatting part (of the
recovered mail) resulted to a very upseting sittuation.


because:

1. it is assumed that you are online
2. if the send fails, it will popup the composer window and let you
decide what to do with it
3. if we save to Outbox temporarily, it's theoretically possible that in
the interim, your auto-send&receive thread will wake up and send all the
messages in Outbox before the composer's Send could send that message,
thus you might end up sending the message twice.
4. And most importantly, at the time we had no way of finding out the
UID of a message after appending it to a folder (we are still not
guarenteed to be able to get the UID of the message we just appended to
a folder, seeing as how IMAP doesn't guarentee it unless it supports the
UIDPLUS extension and implements it *fully* - which unfortunately, some
do not) and so after sending the message - how would we know which
message to delete from the Outbox and move it to the Sent folder?



Hmm... I like the "summary".  And I need the contacts.  But I don't need
the planner or the to do list.  How can I disable them?  Probably there
are guys out there who dislike the summary feature but need the calendar
part.  How can I make them optional so they won't load?


you can't. well, you could just rm -f the executables and then they
wouldn't load :-)



And finally, can I turn that outlookish way of rewriting my receivers? 
I have a friend.  Mr. X.  There is mrx home com and mrx work org  Now,
Evolution will put Mr.X and I won't see the address.  And this is
important.  Also, did I miss something or there's no "nick" field in the
contacts list?  I mean I call Mr.X 'dude'.  And I don't want this to
show up in the "To" field.  Let me rephrase I want to write pal... and
in the "To" field would appear Mr.X <mrx homecom>

I agree that some of the features should be optional.  I know I'm not
the only one who feels like that about some issues, but I can't say
"this is the right way".  So maybe some checkboxes and menus would solve
all the problems.

Well... these are the only problems I discovered.  They seem many.  But
as you can see they are related and one solution would trigger the
solution for the next and so on.  So far the rest is good ;-) even
better than that.

By the way, I came up with another idea.  Something I didn't figgure
out as well.  Can I make something like get mail from account 1 and
account 2 by default and only if I specify "all" or get the mail from
the other accounts manually.  I have 4 current mail boxes.  Two are for
mailing lists - as I subscribe to many I just try to be fair and break
the high traffic in two.  One is "official" like job related things, and
one is for my private mail and only a few have the last two.  So there's
no spam, no virii or other attacks and low traffic as well.  I want to
check from time to time the last two.  And download the mails from the
first two when the phone rates are low.  Can this be done?  Or this is
something I have to add to my list?


I only covered the parts I use, I have no comment about the other
features.






Jeff
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