I have long used Evolution, and have stuck with it for so long because of it's powerful client-side filtering. Recently I upgraded to Fedora Core 1 both on my desktops and servers. In the process I upgraded to Evolution 1.4.5 and Cyrus-imapd 2.1.15. The end result was that automatic filtering was made almost useless. It only worked for messages that had come in while I had all clients closed. Otherwise they would come in, and just sit in the inbox.
To resolve the issue temporarily I tried switching to sylpheed-claws. The current version worked for me better than previous versions, but seemed much slower. It also didn't automatically update folder message counts without being even slower, and wasn't nearly as aesthetically pleasing. Another annoying behavior was it froze the whole interface while it was talking to the server. A few days later I got fed up and starting hunting for a solution to my problem with Evolution again. After looking over the mailing lists and bugzilla I found this was a known issue that seems to date back to at least Evolution 1.2.1 if not farther. The Evolution developers seem unwilling to fix it, saying it is a imap server problem. They do admit that even with a proper imap server you will still have issues if you open other imap clients. They suggested using server-side filtering. Server-side filtering doesn't really work for me for multiple reasons. One, I require the ability to filter based on the body of the message. Sieve, the server-side filtering part of Cyrus-imapd doesn't allow this. I even found other e-mail clients don't allow filters based on the body. An example is Thunderbird which doesn't for imap accounts. Two, I do filtering on three different imap accounts. One is my personal account, and two are work accounts. My employer requires I keep the accounts separate, instead of forwarding it all to one of the three. There are two different servers involved and having to manage rules on both would be greater hassle than just filtering it client side. Three, I can only insert procmail into the mix for more advanced server-side filtering on my personal account. The issue revolves around the Recent flag on messages. Evolution uses this flag to determine if it should automatically filter a message or not. The given reason for this is to prevent filtering a message more than once. An example would be a filter is set to move a message from the Inbox to a folder, but for whatever reason you want to override the filter and move it back to the inbox. Without the Recent flag check the message will get automatically moved back to the folder after Evolution is finished moving it to the inbox. I have observed this myself in the past, and do find it annoying. On the other hand I found it hundred times more annoying not to have reliable automatic filtering. One thing that points to this being a Evolution bug instead of a server bug to me is that automatic filtering always works right in the situation described above where it will automatically filter messages if the Evolution has been closed while the message came in. My workaround/fix for this problem is a simple patch to comment out the if statement that checks for the Recent flag. Normally it would then set a variable on each message to control if it is automatically filtered or not. With the patch the variable is always set, and hence always automatically filtered. This patch works great for me. The only exception I have found is it doesn't always do it on it's own if you aren't in the inbox folder, but switching to the inbox always triggering filtering. A draw back other than the one mentioned above is this patch causes Evolution to filter all messages in the inbox, which slows it down. This is especially true if you let your inbox count get high. Below is a url where you can find the patch. You can also find binary and source rpms for Fedora Core 1. http://proton.cygnusx-1.org/evolution/ If anyone has a better method or patch, please share. _______________________________________________ evolution maillist - [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/evolution
