Re: [Evolution] Filter issue

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

On Wed, 2014-10-29 at 08:11 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
> The order of the filters in this case is unimportant, Junk mails simply
> can't be moved to another folder, because Evolution is buggy. There is
> no other filter rule, that will remove Junk mail back to the virtual
> Junk folder.

I think you've not got the idea of the Junk virtual folder.  The folder
doesn't actually exist.  What it contains are references to all the
messages in all the folders that are marked as "Junk".  So, you can't
"Move" a message into the Junk folder - by marking the message as Junk,
it will be displayed in the virtual folder without being moved from its
original place.  If you move a message that has been marked as Junk from
one folder to another *it will still ONLY be displayed in the Junk
folder*.

This is why people have been telling you to unset the junk flag - so
long as the message is marked as Junk, the ONLY place you will see the
message is in the Junk folder.  You will be able to see where the
original message is by including the "Location" column.

> On different distro's mailing lists, the MUA that most often does cause
> issues is Evolution. Excepted of sqlite, on my machine everything
> Evolution needs, is using current stable versions from upstream.
>
> For users maintaining Evolution for a production environment seemingly
> is impossible. Assumed the developers care less about POP, than about
> IMAP or something else, Evolution shouldn't provide it. Using Evolution
> in an office, there is no time to debug, file bug reports etc.. I guess
> Evolution is for hobby usage and think I will try to drop it within the
> next three or six month.

I use, and have used for many years, Evolution as my main/primary MUA.
It has had periods of being buggy, but the current implementations
appear to be very robust.

I don't want to tell you how to run your life and feel free to ignore
this.  But if you seriously want use Evolution, or indeed Linux, in a
production environment, then I would strongly advise you not to run a
distro that chases latest versions - use a solid, stable, enterprise
Linux such as RHEL/CentOS/SL or SuSe or Debian..

Evolution is most certainly not a "hobby" use MUA - the issue is that
you are using features that are not enterprise features.  Most
businesses that don't use Exchange will use an IMAP server with junk
filtering at the MTA: junk filtering on the desktop is just not a
scalable solution, nor is the use of POP (we don't even support POP and
it is turned off on all my mail servers).

>  The problem is, that I then will lose thousands
> of important mails, so switching to another MUA is not that easy, resp.
> it needs much time for such a transition. A big issue is that Evolution
> is not backward compatible, so downgrading to the last stable version
> often is an issue too.

Use IMAP.  It would solve many of those problems - it will make
migration to another client much easier.  If your provider doesn't
support IMAP or you want to have the mail on your own machine (for
whatever reason), then you may well be better of running something like
fetchmail to retrieve your mail and deliver it to your local SMTP server
- that way you can run a local IMAP server and you can scan the mail for
spam/viruses and filter it before Evolution even sees it.  The filtering
need not just be for junk - you can do all the sorting in to different
folders based on the mail contents as well (procmail is your friend
here, or use an MTA like Exim).

There is no doubt that applications should not crash, and it is
something that the developers need to look at.  But life is sometimes
not ideal and it may be that what you are doing is an edge case and
difficult for the developers to reproduce and fix.  Sometimes you have
to sit back and look at the problem differently and find a more stable
solution to what you are trying to achieve.

P.