Hi I’m on Fedora and the dnf version of Evolution 3.52.4 running in an X session, with an IMAP account.
When I have unread mail in folders they do not show an unread count in the folder list until I click on them. So e.g. a folder appears as “Admin” then I click on the folder and it becomes “Admin (1)” in bold.
It doesn’t seem to effect the Inbox folder, just the child folders underneath. Has anyone else experienced this? It means I sometimes miss an email or have to be sure to click through each folder to really check for unread mails.
Typical - as soon as I start poking around the settings I notice “check for new messages in all folders” and “check for new messages in subscribed folders” under “Receiving Options” which I did not have enabled
I’ve switched them on and it looks to be fixed!
I guess those are disabled by default in case of a large amount of folders/email? Otherwise I don’t know why you’d want them off.
It’s not clear what it means to enable checking of both “all” and “subscribed” folders, surely “all” means “subscribed” anyway, slightly confusing.
I guess those are disabled by default in case of a large amount of
folders/email? Otherwise I don’t know why you’d want them off.
Hi,
I suppose you use a server-side filtering, which means the newly
received messages are sorted into an appropriate folder by the server,
not by the client (Evolution), thus the client does not know there are
new messages until the folder is selected. When there is no server-side
filtering involved, all the messages end in the Inbox and the client
sorts the messages around, thus it knows about them and it can update
the UI properly.
That’s the other reason why the options are off by default, it’s
expected no server-side filtering is involved in most cases. You are
right with the performance hit with many folders too.
It’s not clear what it means to enable checking of both “all” and
“subscribed” folders, surely “all” means “subscribed” anyway,
slightly confusing.
There are several ways how to influence which folders are checked for
new messages regularly and which not. These options overlap in some
aspects. The options evolved in time. The first idea was to use the
subscription flag (which is stored on the server, thus it can be shared
between multiple clients/machines easily) as a flag to check for the
new messages in it.
If you’ve many folders, but only to some of them you receive new
messages, then you can enable check for new mails in them in the
respective folder Properties.
All those options are useful with many archive folders for example,
which are not needed to be checked for new messages regularly. I’m sure
you can find more scenarios where these can be beneficial.
Bye,
Milan
P.S.: I think it is possible to check how many new messages are stored
in the folders of an IMAP server even without checking the content of
the folder, but I never investigated how that could be done, or if at
all possible. You can file a bug against the evolution-data-server
project, thus it would not be forgotten.
I’m unsure about this. I use Gmail via IMAP, with server-side
filtering, and Unread counts do show up correctly in Evo. I also don’t
automatically mark messages as Read, if that makes a difference.
Right, that makes sense - I am using server-side filtering. It was the fact that Evolution seemed to suddenly “remember” I had unread mail when I clicked on a folder that made me think it was a bug, but I guess it’s doing a background update on the folder when I click on it (it seems instantaneous to me).
I don’t know IMAP so well but it looks like a LIST command to get all folders followed by a SELECT on each folder would return information about new emails in each without downloading everything. Are you suggesting this could be a better default for checking an account and thus the different options for checking for new mails could be made redundant?
Hi,
I did not check for the options yet myself, but something like that
could work, even only in some conditions, like if no other option to
check folders for new messages is set, or something like that. I’ve a
lot of folders and while this could still be better than “check for new
messages in all folders” option, it’s still “select & move away” for
the folders. The users may have a reason to not check for the new
messages in the all folders. Maybe. (That would lead to yet another
confusing option, possibly under the Advanced Settings of an IMAP
account?)
