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

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

On Fri, 2018-02-16 at 04:26 +0000, Steve wrote:
> Thank you to all who have answered.
>
> My problem is, 3 of my email addresses are on a private VPS located
> in another country. The location itself is not so much of an issue,
> but when I set up the server (dovecot/postfix) I only configured it
> for POP, and changing to IMAP will mean completely reconfiguring my
> server, which I'm loathe to do since it's also hosts my primary email
> address, and has been working well in the current configuration for
> the past 4 - 5 years. I recall it took me an age to get it working
> correctly

Adding IMAP to dovecot is trivial and won't affect your current POP
configuration.  In dovecot.conf just change "potocols" line to read 

   protocols = imap pop3

and make sure the imap/imaps ports (143/993) are unblocked at the
firewall. That is it. Everything else will continue to work as before. 
It will use the same authentication methods and mail store for IMAP as
for POP.

> Besides, it doesn't explain the slow startup (TB startup as normal
> regardless of where the mail dir was), nor does it explain the
> addressbook issues.

I thought I had in the first reply I sent you.  It's to do with file
locking. Evolution assumes that its private store of data (i.e. where
it stores the "On My Computer" stuff) is local to the machine and so
uses a particular type of file locking. File locks are a particularly
troublesome area of NFS and some of the kludges in NFS to try and cope
with it are nasty and horrible and slow. It's probably not helped by
using symbolic links.

TB is probably designed differently and will use a different file
locking process if it sees files are on a remote server.  Remember,
what you are doing is playing around with Evolution's internal data
storage locations - that is going to be unpredictable.

If you don't want to deal with IMAP, then rather than changing the On
My Computer location, you could try putting the mail in a completely
separate location on the NFS server and creating an account of type
"Maildir format mail directories" to point to it. You can then use
filters to move incoming mail into that location.

I don't know if Evolution will behave better in that configuration, but
it will be much, much better than playing around with the default
locations.

P.