Re: [Evolution] How to write in letters that have come in the In-Box

["Patrick O'Callaghan" <poc usb ve>]

On Thu, 2007-08-16 at 14:14 -0400, George Reeke wrote:
> Dear Dinbandhu (and list),
>    I brought up this same subject on this list a couple of years ago.
> I was told that this will never be put in evolution.  It seems the
> developers have (had at that time?) a strong moral stance that one
> should not be able to edit incoming mail, but only preserve an exact
> copy of it.  You can't even delete unwanted attachments easily.
> I surmise that this is because in certain corporate contexts, one
> might need unaltered copies for legal purposes.
>    I consider that this position is ridiculous, because anybody
> who wants to alter an incoming email can do so with a text editor.
> So it is just a matter of convenience, not of principle.

Since corporate email, virtually by definition, resides on central
servers (IMAP or Exchange) then the argument that you can alter an
incoming email via a text editor is irrelevant. Sure you can do it for
mail which is downloaded and stored locally, but that isn't the context.
The *mail store* is a record of received messages which are often
presumed to be unaltered. As I understand it this can even have legal
consequences at least in the US (don't live there so I may be wrong).

Note also that editing messages invalidates cryptographic signatures.

>  Those
> of us who would like to write notes to ourselves, who are not
> concerned with legal issues, should be able to do so.
   The proposal I made at the time, which I hoped would satisfy
> both kinds of users, was ignored.  Let me suggest it again; I still
> think it is a good idea:  Why not have a configuration option in
> evolution that could be changed only by the root user (at install
> time) that would either allow or disallow the editing of incoming
> mails?  That way, those of us who administer our own systems could
> have this feature if we want it; those in organizations where
> software is centrally administered could be duly deprived of it.

It isn't a question of whether the user's desktop is centrally
administered or not, but of whether the mail store on the server allows
editing and via what mechanism. AFAIK there is no standard way of doing
this. IMAP for one definitely doesn't support it. MUAs which appear to
support it (at least for IMAP, don't know about Exchange) are actually
faking it by making copies of messages. In fact you can even do this in
Evo with a little work: copy or move to the Drafts folder, edit, copy or
move back. Note that this will affect some of the message date headers
because the edited message is now (from the point of view of the server)
a different message from the original.

>    Naturally, this would apply to mail downloaded via POP3; I have
> no idea whether it is workable with IMAP.

It could certainly be done for POP, but at the cost of having a
different set of facilities according to what kind of mail protocol is
used. Personally I keep the vast majority of my mail on IMAP so I can
get to it from anywhere, so something that is only useful for POP
wouldn't be useful to me. YMMV or course.

>    Any more discussion?

I would support a facility for annotations (or memos if you prefer) as
long as it can be done in a cross-platform way.

However in a larger sense, this kind of discussion illustrates that the
traditional view of email is coming under strain. For many people, their
email store is where they conveniently keep and index all kinds of
random information, and I think MUAs are falling behind in supporting
this usefully. Time to invent Email-2.0?

poc