[Evolution] Move behavior and remote trash folder

["Julio M. Merino Vidal" <jmmv menta net>]

Hi all,

I kinda like the contacts manager and address book components in Evolution,
and specially its integration with the GNOME desktop, so I have given it a
try to handle my mail.  However, my experience has not been very successful;
there have been no problems so far, but it does not adapt to my needs (which
are not very complex).  I will explain these issues below.

But let me start with a bit of background.  I have a little server at home
that periodically runs fetchmail from cron to fetch my mail from several
POP3 accounts.  All the mail is processed by procmail and classified into
multiple maildir folders.  The general structure of the folder tree is the
following:

INBOX - Incoming (unclassified) mail is stored in this top-level folder.
    + Archive - This top level folder is just a symlink to Trash.
        + YYYY-MM - These subfolders store all past mail for a given
                    month.  (no spam in them).
    + Drafts
    + Sent
    + Spam - Where bogofilter stores mail that's supposed to be spam.
        + YYYY-MM - Store for old spam (in case I need to rebuild the
                    bayesian database).
    + Trash - The trash folder.  Its contents are archived the first day
              of each month under Archive/YYYY-MM.  No spam should be
              placed here.
    + Lots of other folders, one per mailing list.

There is another cron job that scans all mail in the "current" Archive
and Spam folders on a daily basis to train bogofilter automatically.
(INBOX is not scanned).  Using this simple approach, if bogofilter
makes any false negative, it's stored into INBOX, and I can easily
move it by hand to Spam.  It won't get examined by the cron script
until manual action is taken.

Furthermore, I have mutt configured in the server to be able to read the
mail remotely with ssh.  The server also has courier-imap installed,
accessible only from my workstation.

Ok then, from my workstation I access the server's mail through imap+ssl,
using MUAs like Sylpheed, Thunderbird or even KMail some time ago.
None of these gets in the way to use the approach outlined above, but
Evolution, unfortunately, does.  Let me explain why:

- Evolution lets me configure where my Drafts and Sent folders are, so I
  can easily tell it to use INBOX/Drafts and INBOX/Sent from the account
  preferences window.

  However, there is no way (or at least I can't see it) to change the
  location of the Trash folder.  It keeps using a top level trash folder
  (listed inside the imap account tree) that seems to be local.

  I want it to use the trash folder in the server, so that deleting a
  message "archives" it.  In fact, I want no local mail _at all_.

  Is this "feature" unavailable on purpose?  If not, could it be added?
  Looks like it should be easy, given it's already present for Drafts
  and Sent.

- Whenever I move a mail between folders, a copy of it appears in the
  trash.  Eww, I've _moved_ it, not _deleted_ it.  This makes it
  impossible to apply the approach outlined above to manually move
  false negatives to the Spam folder, because a duplicate will be
  stored in the trash (i.e., in the Archive).

  It also leaves additional copies of messages in the trash when you
  move huge volumes of mail.

  Is this behavior intended?  If so, which is the rationale behind it?
  Could this be changed to a more normal behavior?  AFAICT, no other
  mail client behaves like this...

If any of these get a positive answer, what should I do?  Open a bug
report with "wishlist" priority?

Thank you very much,

-- 
Julio M. Merino Vidal <jmmv menta net>
http://www.livejournal.com/users/jmmv/
The NetBSD Project - http://www.NetBSD.org/