I am new to Evolution as an email client. I want the option to send out emails at a later time or date, rather than right away. How do I do that in Evolution?
Hi, the only related thing that exists is “Edit > Preferences > Composer Preferences > General > Default Behavior > Send messages through Outbox folder: Send after 5 minutes.”
Apart from that, it is not supported to e.g. “send this email at 23:00 tomorrow night” (and it would not make any sense client-side anyway but should be something server-side - what if your local mail client is not running as your machine is switched off?).
For the record, this is the corresponding feature request, but as I understand it, it would need people willing to contribute a fix for it, and it’s probably not a trivial problem to solve because it’s unclear whether IMAP supports any of this?
IMAP definitely does not support this, since it has nothing to do with
sending mail, only with retrieving it.
poc
jfft, why do you wish that? You can use e.g “at”, “cron”, “systemd” and create a mbox file in the Outbox folder, mark it to be send and initiate the send action. The following script works with “evolution 3.52.3 (by Flathub.org)”. I normally use this task at server side, where I use “mutt” or a smtp program but you inspired me to create this simple bash script.
#!/bin/bash
# This script creates a Message to send via Evolution (flatpak)
# $1: sender
# $2: recipient
# $3: subject
# $4: message-body
# $5: send immediately if empty (default)
if [ "$1" == "-h" ]; then
echo 'mailto.sh "sender@dom.org" "recipient@dom.org" "Subject" "This is the body"'
else
sender="${1:-sender@domain.org}"
recipient="${2:-recipient@domain.org}"
subject="${3:-AutoCreated Email}"
body="${4:-This is the body of the email}"
[ -z "$5" ] && send=true || send=false
oboxpath="$HOME/.var/app/org.gnome.Evolution/data/evolution/mail/local"
now=$(date +%s)
file="newmail$now"
# create the mbox mail-file
#$(date "+From $sender %a %b %e %T %Y")
cat <<**EOF** >$oboxpath/.Outbox/cur/$file:2,S
From: $sender
To: $recipient
Subject: $subject
$body
**EOF**
# create an entry in the folder.db database
mlen=$(cat $oboxpath/.Outbox/cur/$file:2,S | wc -c)
sqlite3 $oboxpath/folders.db "INSERT INTO Outbox (uid,flags,msg_type,read,deleted,replied,important,\
junk,attachment,dirty,size,dsent,dreceived,subject,mail_from,mail_to,mail_cc,mlist,followup_flag,\
followup_completed_on,followup_due_by,part,labels,usertags,cinfo,bdata,userheaders,preview,created,\
modified) VALUES ('$file',196624,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,$mlen,$now,0,'$subject','$sender','$recipient',\
NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,NULL,'0 0 0','','0',NULL,'','0',NULL,'$now','$now');"
# to send the entered email, stop and restart evolution
$send && (
flatpak run org.gnome.Evolution -q
flatpak run org.gnome.Evolution &
)
fi
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Social awareness and empathy. There are many strategic reasons why one would want to gracefully interact with other humans based on their preferred activity hours (or official business hours). In the ticket’s description I have added some examples of practical usecases for this.
You can use e.g “at”, “cron”, “systemd” and create a mbox file in the Outbox folder, mark it to be send and initiate the send action. The following script […]
This is way too difficult. It is undocumented/undiscoverable, error-prone, slow/tedious, and apparently inflexible. Also, I definitely do not ever want to be externally mangling Evolution’s databases concurrently with a script nor to require restarting the app to send emails.
It needs to be an Evolution GUI that is simple-enough to use for your average office worker (who can barely get by with basic spreadsheet tasks, if you’re lucky), not require actual programming knowledge nor elevated system privileges. Otherwise we’re just keeping users locked-in to Outlook and GMail because they can’t easily do stuff that has become expected workflows nowadays.
There are many strategic reasons why one would want to gracefully interact with other humans based on their preferred activity hours (or official business hours).
I guess that’s where I’d disagree - I consider email async communication, like postal letters. It is up to the recipient when they go downstairs to check their mailbox, even if I sent my letter on Sundays. (But sure, I would not want to send announcements on a Friday and directly afterwards leave for the weekend without any moderation in place, so to some extent I may agree?)