Re: [Evolution] newbie question - many accounts, one inbox - How???

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

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On Sun, 2020-08-16 at 08:29 +0100, Roger Creagh via evolution-list
wrote:
> Thank you very much Andre, that is most helpful and gets closer to
> what I want. I can then create folders under On this Computer to move
> the stuff I want to keep into.

Please be aware that those folders are only on your local computer and
so will not be available via IMAP and if they contain things of
importance you should make sure they are backed up somewhere.

> One thing puzzled me when playing around with search folders was that
> under “Status” in the options there was no option to select Unread
> messages. That would be really useful.

In the "Show:" drop down above the message list there is an "Unread
messages" selection - you can apply that to any folder, including
search folders.

> One quirk it showed up was that although in MacMail my hotmail inbox
> only has 202 messages in it going back about 8 months, in Evolution
> there are many thousand going back to 2008 which would be about when
> I started using a mac. So it looks like the Mac has never been
> deleting messages on the server, just hiding them. (obvs not an
> evolution problem :-) )

It's standard IMAP (I'm presuming you are using IMAP, you don't say) -
the default for many years was to "Mark messages as deleted" and then
expunge the folder at a later time (in the days of MBOX format,
removing a message from the file was a time consuming process, so it
was done as a batch later).  There is an option in Evolution (under the
"View" menu) to show, or not, the deleted messages.  There are also
options in the account configuration around if & when messages should
be automatically purged.  

The "Mark as deleted" apparently confuses people, so there are now
options to actually delete messages when you delete them - or rather
move the messages to a Trash folder. It's not so much of a performance
hit these days now most places don't use MBOX format any more.

In Evolution these things are labelled as "use a real Trash folder" -
that's because when you only mark a message as deleted, the Trash
folder is a virtual folder containing a list of all messages that are
marked.

> A couple of other replies seemed to think that I was asking the
> Evolution should behave the way I want it for everyone - very far
> from the case; after over 30 years of using email, (I think I got my
> first personal email address in about 1987 on something called
> fidonet) I will certainly have evolved a very personal way of
> handling email. Just need a system that can be tweaked to match me.

Sure, but comments such as "I guess it is because Linux is not written
from a users point of view, but from the computer's point of view" and
"the functional sorting of all mail is a lot more usable" is basically
saying "you Linux geeks have got it wrong and you don't care about the
usability".  (I'll let you into a secret: everything on all computers
is written from "the computer's point of view", it's called
programming; don't believe the marketing hype from MS and Apple - if it
doesn't fit in with the underlying OS restrictions, your program won't
do it, no matter how much more "usable" it makes the GUI.)

We sometimes get people coming on the mailing list saying "Outlook does
it like this, why doesn't Evolution" or "Thunderbird has this option,
where is it in Evolution".  The answer is that Evolution is it's own
thing, it doesn't try and emulate another MUA, it's not an
Outlook/Thunderbird clone. It does some things better, some things
worse.  If you think that there is a killer feature that is missing,
then file a bug against Evolution as a feature request.  Often though
similar features do exist, you just have to modify slightly how you do
things - Apple Mail hasn't existed for ever and it has changed over the
years, so at some point you modified your mail processing to match the
feature set of Apple Mail - think of the move to another mailer as the
opportunity to *improve* your work flow rather than doggedly sticking
to what you've been doing for the last few years.

P.