Re: [Evolution] systemwide mail settings

[Lonnie Borntreger <email borntreger com>]

On Fri, 2003-02-14 at 02:10, Barbara Meurin wrote:
> Hello, 
>
> I am looking for a way to preconfigure those mail settings which are the
> same for every user in a company. 

I assume that you mean the mail server settings?


> I would like to do this using Evolution 1.2, KDE 3.1 and Debian Woody. 
>
> Things that would help: 
>
> - Where does Evolution write the settings to? 

$HOME/evolution contains the file config.xmldb which contains the
information you would need.  There are a couple of things that you would
need to take care of for pre-populating information in that file.
1 - the strings in that file are encoded.  You would have to make a
script to encode your server strings into the format that evolution
reads.  (It's not a difficult mapping.)
2 - Those settings are a part of the account settings, so you would have
to create an account with the settings, which users would have to be
told to modify to include their account specific settings.
3 - The default directory structure for $HOME/evolution would have to be
pre-populated (especially the "local" sub-directory) to keep Evolution
happy when first started by the user.

With some careful hacking, you could probably do this... and if made a
script to be run by the user, could even put the login into the account
information.

But then again, starting Evolution for the first time will automatically
prompt the user for the email settings, and they are 3-4 very
straightforward dialogs - just like Outlook or any other mailer, that it
would probably be easier to just create a web page showing the dialogs
and the default server settings for users to refer to.  I think that
this would probably be a safer bet than saying, "When you first start
Evolution, you will not be asked for any information, but you must
immediately go to Tools->Settings->Accounts->Edit->Receiving and add
your account."  Or having them remember to run some script before
running Evolution.

> - Where is defined the path where Evolution looks for settings? 

In the source.

TTFN,
Lonnie Borntreger