On Mon, 2002-05-27 at 23:24, Raider wrote: > Hello! > > I'm a happy user of Evolution 1.0.2 on a MDK8.2. > > Well... now I don't know if the developers are on this list or not. If > they are - than maybe they can give me some answers like "this can be > done" "this is out of the question" "this should be out with the next > version". If they aren't maybe the list can help me with some > oppinions.
I'm a mail hacker, I dont work on the editor, but i'll comment where I can. > My fist complaint (or did I miss something?) is that I want to use > another editor than the default. How can this be done? It can't. You dont seem to have any real reasons why the editor is unusable though. Personally i'd like to use emacs, or even vi, but i can't *shrug*, its still adequate. > And here comes my list of problems with the editor. > 1. There's no word wrap setting (not to my knowledge). I'd be grateful > if somebody will point me that "missing" option. You mean setting the mode to 'normal' or 'preformat'? > 2. Related with the first one, there's no limit to the text... > "wideness". It would be great to be a check box like "intelligent > resize" that will wrap text according to window lenght, besides the > normal "fixed" option. You mean setting the 'normal' option? > 3. A new line in an unwrapped quoted text leads to two newlines instead > of one. And I have to edit by hand the extra newline. Anyone knows > why? I guess because its changing the text from preformat to 'normal'. Its a different paragraph, and its being done in html, so you get an extra line becuse you've inserted 'normal' between two 'pre' blocks. I know the quoting stuff has been worked on a lot, so i dont know if this will change in the future (1.2?). > 4. There's only one type of "quotation". So if I I have two levels of > quotation there's no change as Evolution doesn't know about it. That is being worked on I believe, should be in 1.2(?). This also affects the 'problem' above, and is probably why it works the way it does. > 5. The "quotation" color is one of the most uninspired parts of > Evolution. If I accidently delete a '>' sign, when I put it back it > will show up with the same color as my aditions... although '>' at the > beginning of a line means quote. Not really. '>' at the beggining of the original text means a quote. It is no longer the original text because you've changed it. You wouldn't expect to type '> blah' on a line by itself and have it magically changed to a quote, would you? > 6. Breaking lines manually from the quote will show them with the > quotation color, although this is false - to the person that will > receive that mail from the broken lines, only the first segment will be > shown as quote. The rest will be... just text. I dont understand what you mean here? If you're just sending as text anyway there are no colours. There is no quoting. There's only the 'convention' of using '> ' at the begining of the line, which isn't any hard and fast, defined 'standard', many mailers use other conventions (such as 'INITIALS > ' or 'Name $ '). > 7. As an addition to the previous problem, actually a combination of the > previous two, if I manually add the '>' sign to the beginning of the > line it will show as normal text and the rest will be as quote. I know, > one solution would be to turn this different coloring off. But this > doesn't mean that part doesn't need improvement. Doesn't sound terribly life threatening to me. Especially when there are real bugs to fix. > 8. Again about quotes - from the reply, normally (and it makes sense) if > I want to break between line X and line X+1 to insert my comments it > will put just one newline. This is weird as (see above) this would make > sense to give at least two newlines, a lot more than in the previous > sittuation. Now, I've seen on other mail clients (no names) that a Why no names? > newline would mean even three newlines, so my text would be clearly > isolated from the original text making things a lot more readable for > all, and especially for the guys who see it in plain text with no > colors. Anyway, I do that, and I'd like to have this set by the mailer > and not push enter three times than press "up" once. I'd rather it worked the way it does, personally. Its more like a plain old editor (e.g. emacs, vi), which is what i'm used to, not some silly 'smart' editor which gets in the way of what you're trying to do. > 9. Evolution crashed on me only twice. I don't complain about this as I > don't know what triggered the problem and I can't reproduce the > problem. With this occasion I discovered that it can recover text. Way > to go! Great feature. And it really saves time. But, to my > dissapoinment it reformatted my text. My replies go like this... quote, > newline, newline, tab, my text, newline, newline, quote. With other > words my text is sepparated from the original text by one empty line > both before and after and I indent my paragraph with one tab. Recovery > just removed the first empty line before my each insertion and it also > removed the tabs. Perhaps you're only sending as text and its recoving from a text message, in which case I think it loses most formatting information. Although i'm not really sure on this one. > 10. Back to the main issue - why not make it smart enough (the editor) > and understand that a newline in the quotation means break the line than > add a '>' to the beginning of the new line and put a space after it than > go on with the rest of the line. And that the second newline means > keeping the things the way they were set and adding three (or two...) > empty lines than put the cursor on the second empty line. I'm not sure, perhaps this is being worked on too. The quotation stuff has been developed lately, as I said above. Again, it doesn't appear to be a show-stopper bug. > 11. I see the editor has a hard time with highlighting addresses as > well. It highlights even the '>' or the dot that belongs to the end of > phrase. Sounds like the end of the world to me! > I have to add that I use only the "plain text" features as I don't plan > to use the HTML mails any time soon. So why bother about any of the colouring stuff? It all gets dropped as soon as you send it anyway. Like, who really cares what it looks like on the screen, just set the quote colour to the same as the text colour and be done with it? It seems to be an awful lot of niggling over something which doesn't even mean anything. > The filter problems: > 1. The filters are quite limited. There is only a global AND and a > global OR for all of the criterions of a rule. I'm used to employ > procmail, and I have quite some problems implementing rules like: > (E1 OR E2) AND (E3 OR E4 OR E5) You should probably just keep using procmail then. If you use a maildir store, evolution works just fine with it. You *could* enter the rules (you can basically do anything) as complex s-expressions, but that isn't documented and liable to change anyway. > 2. In case you don't come up with some type of grouping of the > criterions, why not make some "composite" rules. I mean, so far if I > have two mailing lists to filter for "uninteresting" mails and for > offensive mails I'm lost. For all simple rules "if... than" type I can > just choose "stop". this is an excellent option as it speeds up the > process if you have many rules. But I can't say > rule1: E1 OR E2 - action goto rule 14 > rule14: E3 OR E4 - delete; stop. Just stick to procmail I guess. The filters werent' designed for this type of mess. You can't implement goto's in the s-expressions either. > 3. As an alternate, I see Evolution goes for "all in one pack", but how > can I plug in say procmail for processing incoming mail taken by > Evolution. I see it keeps the mbox... Just use maildir and point evolution to the maildir tree. You can use mbox trees as well (at least in 1.1), but they're not as efficient. > 4. Am I missing something? If I put 'To:' in the specific field my rule > would be ignored. It will work only with 'To', no ':'. Why? Yep, you are. "to" is the header name, not "to:". The ':' is just the rfc822 syntax to delineate it in the message and is not part of the header name at all. > The DNS problem. If I'm online... send now and it is sent. If I'm > offline and forget to check the offline mode I'm toast. It will get > into a endless (or very loooong) loop and try to send that message. > Same goes if I'm disconected - I'm on dial-up. And reconnecting won't > help at all. Can't it just "monitor" the connection. Okay, say you > have a noisy line and the responses are slow... or... maybe you have a > 2400baud modem ;-) No problem. But if I'm offline it makes no sense. > And the problem becomes bigger if my line dropps for some reason as I > didn't see Evolution recover for the new connection (both identified as > ppp0! but different IPs for sure). We use the timeouts that the operating system gives us for tcp connections. Tcp timeouts take a while, and we dont know about them till the OS tells us. This is how we 'monitor' the connection. I dont think there's any way to do more than this in an portable way, as we are abstracted from the hardware by the operating system. > The above issue triggered two extra problems. > > The connection problem: say I want to grab my mail. For each connection > there is a cancel button. Excellent. With one small side problem - the > I can send mails via different relays, and all mails are put in the same > queue and I can't disconect only a certain relay (say the server is > overloaded and instead of being online for 5 minutes I can choose to go > online later for those particular mails). Hmm... actually this seems to > be another problem. So this should be entitled "the connection > problems". Anyway, it's good to have those cancel buttons for every > connection even if they are only incoming connections. But if I hit > send the mail will be delivered in the background. If the server is > slow or it doesn't respond I can't cancel this action. I searched and > found nothing that can kill/delay that send. The cancel button might work on the main display, then again it might not, i'm not too sure on this one. > Now... probably this was done with swiftness in mind. But I don't see > it as a good feature. What do I mean? I hit send later... and the mail > will go to outbox, than, after sending to the sent mail folder. Great. > And configurable. But if I hit send (as in send now) it will go... > suspended. That message won't be anywhere till it getts send. Or, if I > kill evolution it will go back as "recovered" message and the story > starts from the same point. Why isn't the "send now" message copied to > "outbox" till the delivery process announced the mail is on its way? > The last two problems combined with the reformatting part (of the > recovered mail) resulted to a very upseting sittuation. Well, its because its 'send now', that means 'send now'. It doesn't mean 'send when you can'. If you want to do that, you should use 'send later', and use the send/receive button. It should be launching a background thread to perform the sending anyway, not hanging the application. If it'll make you feel any better from being so upset, here's a flower :) @>-,-`-,--- > Hmm... I like the "summary". And I need the contacts. But I don't need > the planner or the to do list. How can I disable them? Probably there > are guys out there who dislike the summary feature but need the calendar > part. How can I make them optional so they won't load? You dont click on them. i.e. you can't. You can probably hide them from the gui by removing their directories in ~/evolution//local, but some parts will still load anyway in certain circumstances. > And finally, can I turn that outlookish way of rewriting my receivers? > I have a friend. Mr. X. There is [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] Now, > Evolution will put Mr.X and I won't see the address. And this is > important. Also, did I miss something or there's no "nick" field in the > contacts list? I mean I call Mr.X 'dude'. And I don't want this to > show up in the "To" field. Let me rephrase I want to write pal... and > in the "To" field would appear Mr.X <mrx@homecom> This i couldn't agree on more. For some reason the UI 'gods' think that its better not to know the email address. I'd like it changed but I can't imagine it happening while there are bigger problems to fix. Still, its not really the end of the world either, but you could always try submitting a patch. > I agree that some of the features should be optional. I know I'm not > the only one who feels like that about some issues, but I can't say > "this is the right way". So maybe some checkboxes and menus would solve > all the problems. > > Well... these are the only problems I discovered. They seem many. But > as you can see they are related and one solution would trigger the > solution for the next and so on. So far the rest is good ;-) even > better than that. > > By the way, I came up with another idea. Something I didn't figgure > out as well. Can I make something like get mail from account 1 and > account 2 by default and only if I specify "all" or get the mail from > the other accounts manually. I have 4 current mail boxes. Two are for > mailing lists - as I subscribe to many I just try to be fair and break > the high traffic in two. One is "official" like job related things, and > one is for my private mail and only a few have the last two. So there's > no spam, no virii or other attacks and low traffic as well. I want to > check from time to time the last two. And download the mails from the > first two when the phone rates are low. Can this be done? Or this is > something I have to add to my list? You can goto the mail config and disable the accounts easily. It was done that way specifically for this reason (well, among others, but it was a high priority reason). > > I only covered the parts I use, I have no comment about the other > features. > > > _______________________________________________ evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution
