Re: Evolution and Procmail- can they work together?

[Nils Philippsen <nils redhat de>]

On 13 Aug 2001 12:20:30 -0400, Jeffrey Stedfast wrote:
> On 13 Aug 2001 11:00:37 +0200, christophe barbé wrote:
> > You are going to discover that even if evolution uses mbox (you can choose
> > the format), procmail is not well supported.
> > Evolution will not noticed new mails. Evolution will rescan each mailbox
> > touched by procmail at each startup and this can take a long time.
> > 
> > Christophe
> 
> What you really want to do is filter into an mbox and have Evolution
> import it. *Or*, you could tell evolution to use these filtered mbox
> files as "spool"'s and use them that way.
> 
> The reason you can't just dump mail into Evolution's folders is because
> it keeps a summary of them and if you append to the mbox without
> updating the summary files, then they get out of sync. Not to mention
> Evolution uses file locking, I'm not sure whether or not procmail does?

It does (if you configure it properly ;-). Since the last beta, I almost
use evolution exclusively with the notable exception of being off-site
and having only access to a Secure Shell connection. To handle this
case, I (as someone else already said) set up evolution to access my
mail spool via IMAP and everything is dandy. I.e. procmail filters the
mails into my mbox style files below ~/mail on the mail server and
evolution reads those folders instead of keeping its own.

BTW: I wonder what the "correct" place to post some wishlist items is. I
have some features that I sorely miss in evolution which Pine has had
(Yes I know. Pine. That old terminal-based MUA with the sucky license.).
I hope noone feels too spammed if I just post them on gnome-list and
evolution-hackers:

- Pine had the ability to move read messages into an archive folder (say
list-evolution to archive-evolution).
- I could use Pine all from the keyboard (yes, this was a lame example).
- Pine asked me whether or not I want to quote the mail I reply to or
not. I don't know how to cope with this from a UI point of view, but
my idea was to put a button near the reply-to and reply-to-all buttons
acting kind of like the "bold" and "italic" buttons in
word-processors, i.e. defining whether evolution quotes when replying
or not. The button could show a balloon containing some quoted text
and some normal text (only silhouettes), the quoted text is greyed out
  when the button is not active/pressed/whatever. I would draw some
ASCII-art if I didn't know that it'd hurt tigert's feelings way beyond
reason ;-).

Not necessarily related to Pine:

- Icon related: In the composer, the To: and Cc: buttons should have
some icons so that they catch your eye. My idea would be an arrow
pointing towards a group of figures, one tall and 3 or 4 small. For
To:, the tall figure would be colored, translucent and in front of   the
small ones (which would be grey), for Cc: it would be the opposite
(small ones colored and translucent, in front of tall one which is
grey). Given the size constraints, only the tall figure or the small
three or four could be better.
- It would be great if one could (re)define their own keyboard-shortcuts
I remember that in GTK apps you could define the shortcuts online in
the menu by just pressing the key-combo (saving them is another
story). This way, I could redefine Pos1 and End to jump to Beginning-
and End-of-Line respectively, just the way it was meant to be ;-). The
way it is at the moment, it jumps to beginning and end of the mail. At
the beginning, there's "Hi Harold, ..." and at the end is my signature
-- probably the pieces of text I'm interested the least in. Writing
this mail, I fell into that pit more than 5 times (yet again)... no
fun.
- Is it possible for evolution to index the IMAP folders as well for
quick full-text searches? Other than that I only miss Pine's feature
to automatically save read mails into an archive folder.
Identification of the mails for indexing purposes is done by
Message-Id, right?

Nils
-- 
           Nils Philippsen / +49.711.96437.250 / nils redhat de
         Red Hat GmbH / Hauptstätter Straße 58 / D70178 Stuttgart
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