Re: [Evolution] Schedule a filter?

[Nick Jenkins <nickpj gmail com>]

> I suppose my problem is my email space is very limited at my new
> company compared to the amount of automated mail coming in.  That's
> why I'd like to purge mail after a couple of days.  But your tools
> require me to do that MANUALLY.
>
> So now I have filters that work on incoming mail.  The problem is,
> that you correctly enable nifty features to delete mail that is of
> some age. But these are useless on incoming mail by definition.  And
> they cannot be scheduled to occur, and they do not work AUTOMATICALLY
> by themselves. Therefore, they have to be APPLIED MANUALLY, one folder
> at a time.
>
> That is the frustration.

Just thinking out loud here, but:

1) Maybe what you want instead of a scheduler is more trigger actions
for filters.

Currently, under Edit -> Message Filters, there are two triggers
defined, "Incoming" and "Outgoing", where "Incoming" is triggered on new
mail by the action of receiving mail, and "Outgoing" is triggered on
mail that is being sent by the action of sending mail. (The
user-interface doesn't use the word "triggers", but in my mental model
of Evo, that's what I think of them as.)

If there were more trigger actions, such as "Close program" and/or
"Start program", then that might allow a way of automatically running
your filters on existing messages at a convenient time (end of the day
or beginning of the day), without the need to re-invent a deferred
scheduling system such as cron or atd.

Of course, using such a feature would make starting up or closing Evo
slower, just as using the "Search Folders" feature makes start-up
slower, but that's the price you pay for performing a lot of actions at
start-up or exit.

2) What you would probably would also need is another "condition" for
the "Add rule" dialog box, that allows saying which folders the rule
applies to. E.g. a way of testing a "Folder" for "is"/"is or is under".
To save on having hundreds of filters (if you have hundreds of folders)
- some sort of hierarchical capacity would be good (hence the "is or is
under" test).

With both of those, I _think_ that would get you what you're looking for
(the ability to close Evo, have it automatically trigger the filters,
which would then apply the existing test for message age, together with
the new tests for folders, and apply all the actions you wanted, such as
deleting the old mail items so that your mailbox did not grow too large;
then you'd also configure Evo to empty the trash on exit, so that the
delete from the filters was a non-reversible delete, rather than a label
as Trash).

If the above makes sense to you and sounds like it would solve the
problem, then you really should log an enhancement request (or rather
two requests, one for each of the above - probably better to keep them
separate) at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/ ; if not then please make a
counterproposal with a series of concrete specific actionable minimal
changes that you think will solve the problem.

Ultimately though, after perhaps a bit of debate and some rough
consensus emerges, something will have to end up in the bug tracking
system. Without this, it's pretty much a given that it won't happen.
With this, it's by no means certain, but you at least have a chance. If
you do log a request, please post the bug number(s) here as a follow-up
for any other interested readers.

-- All the best,
Nick.