Re: [Evolution] Default From address stopped working

[John Lange <john johnlange ca>]

On Thu, 2009-11-19 at 09:51 +1100, Nick Jenkins wrote:
> To me the bugfix in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=524497
> made a lot of sense, and I'm very happy to give a counter-argument to
> illustrate why it was useful.

[...]

I now understand why this change was made. My only comment would be that
I don't think it's normal to have the exact same email addresses on
multiple accounts. There would normally be one authoritative place for
mail to sit.

So in your case if your using the same email address for local and imap
perhaps fetchmail should be grabbing the mail from imap and delivering
it to local but on the other hand I don't see why the user shouldn't be
able to do things this way if they want.

That being said, your other example, where the same mail is delivered to
two different email addresses (both configured in Evolution) is probably
a much more typical example.

> So, to try to understand your situation, I'm guessing that you have
> accounts something like this:
> 1) "IMAP - me gmail com"  (i.e. remote IMAP, everything gets forwarded to this)
> 2) "IMAP - me work com"  (i.e. remote IMAP for the work email address)
> 3) "IMAP - me home org"  (i.e. remote IMAP for the personal email address)

Correct.

> ... and then you're replying to a mail that's in the "IMAP -
> me gmail com" account, sent to "me home org", and wanting the reply to
> be sent using the "IMAP - me home org" account, rather than from the
> "me gmail com" account. Am I understanding your set-up correctly?

Yes. Exactly.

> If so, I'm trying to think of an elegant way to solve this, without
> introducing a preference, that keeps everyone happy .... How about if
> the rules below were applied, in the following order, until a match is
> found:
> 1) use the current account, if the current account's email address is
> anywhere in list of recipients (TO, CC, etc). [that solves my problem]

Yes.

> 2) use another configured account, if its email address is in the list
> of recipients. [that solves your problem]

Yes.

> 3) If neither of the above is the case, then use the current account's
> email address [that solves the case of me alias org 
>    which forwards to me home org, where there is no me alias org
> account configured, which is something that I have].

This one needs more discussion.

Evolution has an option for "Default" account. My first intuition is
that this account would be used as the default account for composing and
sending email if nothing else matches. So something like:

3) If neither of the above is the case, the use the default account.

I admit it is debatable whether it should use the selected account or
the default account but if you don't use the default account for this
purpose then for what?

If you consider my scenario, I have several active accounts that never
get mail delivered to their inboxes (they are just there for setting the
correct "FROM" address and signature). So my selected account is always
the same (the gmail account).

However, I _never_ use the gmail account as the "FROM" address. It's
always one of the other configured accounts, one of which I have
selected as the default. My preference is that this is the one that
should be used if neither of #1 or #2 matches.

And one final clarification, the concept of the "FROM" address is
separate from the actual sending/delivery of the mail.

It is common to have several "Mail Accounts" setup that have the
"Sending Email" part of their configuration empty (this supports
composing or replying to mail under scenario #2 above as I described).

So in all situations, if the selected account has no "sending"  method
configured, use the default account for sending/delivery.

I'm sure you well understand that but I just wanted to mention it so it
didn't get forgotten.

BTW, are you going to reopen 524497 or create a new one or .... ? I was
going to put these comments there as well.

Regards,

-- 
John Lange
http://www.johnlange.ca