Re: [Evolution] Changing subject lines of received emails

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist us>]

On Mon, 2008-05-19 at 23:15 +0100, andy wrote:
> Is there someway that I (it'll be me doing the tweaking) can set 
> Evolution up so that someone can edit the subject line of an email
> they have received so that it can be stored in the inbox (wherever)
> with the newly edited subject line?

The short answer is "No".  This kind of request comes up relatively
regularly, in different contexts (some people want to edit subject
lines, some people want to delete large attachments, etc.)

The reasons given by the Evo developers for not allowing this are
twofold, as I understand it: first, just a general unhappiness that
allowing email you receive to be edited is "not right".  Second, and
more importantly IMO, is that Evo supports a large number of mail
backends (POP, IMAP, Exchange/OWA, etc.) and most of those backends have
no facility for allowing this.  In fact, the only one where it would be
possible AFAIK is the local copy (typically POP or local mail spools).

Personally I would love to see this made available for those backends
where it's possible, but the Evo developers would prefer to not support
it (or, at least, they don't have the energy/time to work on it) if it
can't be supported in most if not all backends.


As a refugee from Emacs VM, which was hugely capable in many ways, I do
miss the ability to delete attachments since it regularly happens that
someone sends me a gigantic attachment of a core file or similar which
is completely useless to me, but I do want to preserve the message
(containing the backtrace for example).

However, so far this hasn't risen to the level of "can't live without"
for me, at least.


Anyway.  Maybe she would have better luck with Evolution's email label
feature?  I've not used it myself but it sounds like something she could
make use of.  The only problem is if she wants to have lots and lots of
them created and deleted relatively quickly it might be a problem.
Evo's interface to mail labels is not very "quick and easy".  It's more
geared to "set up a bunch of static labels and reuse them".