Evolution is unresponsive to user requests while it's busy using the IMAP server to check for mail in new folders. It doesn't seem capable of prioritising IMAP commands due to direct user action above the background checks for new mail. What makes this _much_ worse, however, is the fact that Evolution will check for mail in _all_ folders, not just in active folders. This wastes a lot of time and network traffic. For a while, I've had a patch which corrects this behaviour by checking for new mail only in folders which are marked as active on the IMAP server. This patch makes the difference between Evolution actually being usable when connected by GPRS, and not being usable. It's not really appropriate for upstream inclusion as-is, but I haven't bothered to tidy it up because even the patches which _are_ appropriate for upstream are generally too painful to get past the Ximian monkeys. See the discussion about the simple fix for bug #151121, for example.
Created attachment 118594 [details] Somewhat hackish patch.
There are updated patches for this in the GNOME bug and in RH bug #183219
Let's try to get this for f9.
Hi David, we did some work in upstream bug and it's in trunk since 2007-12-11, so in F9 2.22.0 I think. I know you had some comments in upstream bug, but can we close this please?
What's implemented upstream isn't particularly useful, although it's good progress. It really does need to be using the 'active folder' information from the IMAP server instead of require manual configuration which has to be reproduced, with the mouse, on every client computer. And kept up to date when new folders are added. Close it WONTFIX if you must, but it's not resolved in rawhide yet.
OK, we should reopen the upstream bug then.
David, when I was looking around within other bug fix, then I noticed the subscriptions on IMAP are used to create/remove folders, thus I guess you do not see your folders which you unsubscribe, do you? All the logic in the code as I noticed is just like that, unsubscribe means similar thing as delete on providers with this capability (thus on an IMAP too). As I understand it, then if you see that folder even after unsubscribe, then that's the bug, not the feature. I can be wrong here, though. The only thing I want to say is that the subscriptions on an IMAP account has its meaning already.
That's optional, and I have the 'show only subscribed folders' option turned off. It doesn't make much sense with dedicated mailstores -- it was more useful for stuff like wu-imapd which would show the whole of your home directory. According to the IMAP specs, subscription status means that the folder is "active", with no further definition of what that means in practice. An interpretation which _does_ make sense with dedicated mailstores is that those are the folders in which you want to check for new mail...
I see, I overlooked that option :( Will it make sense to have there one more option, "Check for new messages in subscribed folders only"? I'm not sure whether to keep or not to keep the old option for that checking, but I would prefer to keep it (or will it be too confusing?)
Finally moving this upstream (I reopened the bug), we will not do this in Fedora only, but will rather coordinate with them. Please move any other discussion there. Thanks in advance. http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=336074