[Evolution] Three tough problems in Eudora to Evolution transition

[Vern McGeorge <test1 VernMcGeorge com>]

I've had it with Windows and am grinding my way through a transition from the morabund Eudora on WinXP on my old laptop to Evolution on Ubuntu on my new laptop.

I have Evolution working pretty well except for the following annoyances that I am hoping someone from the Evolution community can resolve.

My major problems stem from the fact that I like to automatically filter and prioritize my email as it comes in so I can read the important stuff first. I don't filter on the sender's email address because it can change. Also, I know many people with multiple addresses. Thus sender based filters are numerous and prone to failure.

I also don't rely on keywords in the subject (e.g. "[MAILING LIST] Blah, blah, blah...") as there will always be messages that have no subject or leave out he keywords.

I DO sort on the recipient email address and then I give out a new email address within my own domain to each group of people that I interact with. It's not perfect as I know several people that fit within multiple groups and thus know me by multiple email addresses.

My first problem is that I think some people send email to their broader group of friends (who may not, in fact, know each other) using BCC or some equivalent that suppresses the recipient list rather than TO. The end result is that while Eudora could filter these messages, Evolution does not. I'd like a better solution than more filters on Subject or From.

My second problem is that I have 43 email addresses defined in my domain and thus 43 accounts defined in Evolution. When I "Send/Receive" email, I get problems with multiple threads hanging while "Fetching Mail" and multiple pop-ups asking for the password for many of my accounts. The accounts are all defined to "Remember Password" for both POP and SMTP.
I suspect that what's going on is some sort of resource collision or exhaustion caused by 43 threads all trying to check mail at the same time but I can't figure out how to get things to happen at a more orderly 10 at a time. I'd put up with 1 at a time to fix this.

My third problem is less well understood. Despite the fact that I am sending HTML email, I haven't yet figured out how to get my name in a signature to be in a cursive font. The Evolution based tools allow me to set my name in bold, italic, and blue but not cursive. Grrr! I haven't looked too hard at how to solve this but the obvious references I've found haven't helped yet. What I'd really like is a way to build up a style sheet to embed in my messages to let me control the format of both message body and signature. Probably too much to ask for but if anybody has a solution, I'm all ears.

-- Vern