Re: [Evolution] Applying filters automatically.

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

On Fri, 2008-02-01 at 18:15 +0000, Gavin Simpson wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-02-01 at 18:03 +0000, Pete Biggs wrote:
> > Remember 'New' != 'Unread' - if something else (like a mail notifier or
> > another email app) is seeing the email before Evo, then it is no longer
> > 'New'.  This is an IMAP function and nothing to do with Evo - Evo just
> > asks the IMAP server "What's new?" and acts on the results.
>
> OK, I'll bite ;-)
>
> Evolution seems to take an incredibly sensitive view of what is 'New'.
> The other mailers I have used will filter messages automatically using
> the IMAP server at my institution, but Evolution flatly refuses. I
> appreciate that Evo might be doing things properly, but if that stops it
> working for the user, isn't that taking it a bit far?

Depends.  To get a list of the 'new' messages (i.e. mail received since
the imap server was last polled), all it needs is an imap command saying
'give me a list of the new messages', then it just downloads those
messages.  To do anything else needs Evo to download every single
message header/flags and possibly body.  That's fine if you have 30 or
40 messages in your inbox - but when you have a couple of thousand, it
takes time.  And yes, you do have to download them all because you never
know what other application has changed a message to now make it
eligible for filtering.

Sure it can be annoying, but doing things another way can be annoying to
other people.  If all mail programs did everything exactly the same way,
it wouldn't matter what you use.

> In my case, our University computing people changed the IMAP software to
> Dovecot recently. They use the 'snarf' Dovecot plugin to copy the mail
> from the mail spool to the users IMAP INBOX when the INBOX is polled for
> new messages. Overnight this stopped Evo from filtering my messages
> automatically, but Thunderbird for example works as it did before they
> made this change, and continues to filter the messages automatically.

I don't know about the snarf plugin, but I use Dovecot without any
problems on my servers - as does our University mail servers.  To me, it
seems like a bug with the 'snarf' plugin if its not reporting as 'new'
things that actually are.

P.