Re: [Evolution] Couple of questions - profile and bash

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> 1. I don't want my mail and addressbook on the local drive, but on my
> NFS. That way, I can use whichever computer is handy to use evolution
> (only on one machine at a time). I've copied the mail and addressbook
> folder to the NFS, and ln -s to the folders, whilst mail works fine,
> the addressbook complains that it can't find the folder. Moving it back
> to the local drive and it's fine, but this will mean syncing between
> machines.
>
> I've also noticed with the mail folder on the NFS, evolution takes an
> age to start, whilst it's almost instant if the folder is on the local
> machine.

No, don't put the mail folders on NFS.  NFS is horrendously inefficient
and it will, as you've seen, slow things down. It's to do with file
locking and that sort of thing, not with the absolute data transfer
rates.

It's also not a wise thing to do to share the data folders.  Rightly or
wrongly Evolution assumes that it knows the state of it's own private
data areas - if another version of Evolution alters that private data
it could cause problems.  It may appear to work now, but it's not a
supported configuration so things may break horribly. Evolution just
isn't designed to work in that configuration.

If you want to share mail between multiple programs, then I seriously
suggest (very, very, seriously) that you set up an IMAP server and
point all your mail programs at that. It will save you having to manage
multiple copies of the data and IMAP is designed to work in that way.

I presume you are currently using POP to retrieve your mail (otherwise
why would you even be wanting to share mail over NFS), in that case you
can use something like 'fetchmail' to retrieve the mail from your
provider and populate the IMAP folders.

For an addressbook, LDAP is an obvious choice, although some might
think that it is difficult to setup. CardDAV is another possibility,
but that requires a web server setup (and I'm not sure the Evolution
version is RO or RW).  If you have a permanent net connection then it
may be simpler to use a Google account (For example. Other providers
are available).

> 2. When I used TB, I had conky scripts that would report the number of
> unread mails for different accounts within conky (TBH, it's just a bash
> script that parses the output for conky). Is it possible to get an
> unread mail count from evolution via bash (whilst evolution is running
> in GUI mode)? Even if it's just a total, that will do for now.
No, there's no scripting like that available for Evolution. Remember
that Evolution is part of the Gnome ecosystem and it's just not a
scripting/command line type environment.  I suppose there's no reason
why something can't interrogate evolution-data-server for the
information, but I suspect it's not a trivial thing to do.

Nevertheless there are GUI type things to display unread mail count
within a desktop environment - perhaps if you tell use what your
scripts do with the unread count someone might be able to suggest an
alternative. It might also be an idea to tell us what your desktop
environment is.

P.