Re: [Evolution] Evolution - Dealing with groups

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Thu, 2022-05-05 at 21:38 -0700, Ubuntu Shoto Dojo wrote:
> How can I receive from a group?  

SMTP has no concept of a group; the upshot is there is nothing in the
message envelope [headers, etc...] which indicate a message was sent to
a group.

What "group" means is always an implementation detail of the client
and/or server.

> I need to receive response (or unexpected messages from the group and
> put them together (group them) in a folder.  I  can find nothing in
> the filters which seem to have any such ability, maybe[Sender] [is in
> group] [specific Contact List]

I, in 30 years [including as a groupware developer], have never seen
such a feature. 

> This is non-trivial (and perhaps a killer to use Evolution), as I
> currently have 17 folders into which I need to sort incoming emails,
> based on 50+ contact lists, ranging from 6 entries to 250+ entries in
> the list.  Trying  to manually maintain individual email addresses in
> filters as thingschange is a complete no-go.

Can you really find no other solution to achieve whatever The Goal of
this usecase is?   Doing truly tortuous things with e-mail is rarely
the best - or only - approach.   Filter on an inbound list of 250+ e-
mail addresses... as an Administrator my immediate response to a user
doing such a thing would be "Don't do that; what are you attempting to
achieve?"   Or you need a server side solution; this isn't an
appropriate task for an e-mail client.

> Is there some way to compare an incoming email address to a Contact
> List?

If you want to attempt to implement something like this Client-Side I
suspect the correct answer would be to use the "pipe to program"
Condition.  Then write a script that talks to EDS and compares to
groups [this is non-trivial, but likely the only correct way]

Or run a server; this is something Postfix can do.  Again non-trivial. 

> Is there any documentation for the storage format for
> 1)  Contacts and Contact Lists
> 2)  Filters
> because I could write (bash/awk/perl/whatever) scripts to update the 
> filters based on the lists, if that is all that is available.

Don't do that.   You can talk to EDS via D-Bus or libfolks(?), do not
grouse around inside files.

-- 
Adam Tauno Williams <mailto:awilliam whitemice org> GPG D95ED383
Systems Administrator, Python Developer, LPI / NCLA