Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 449284
Evolution changes all mail from New to Old whenever it opens.
Last modified: 2016-09-19 22:38:46 EDT
Description of problem: I'm a mutt user, but occasionally use evolution for some things. My setup consists of local maildir folders. The problem is, that even when I open evolution for a few seconds, it marks all of my new mails as "old". So when I fire up mutt all of the 'N' messages are now 'O', and thus I am not notified that these folders have new messages. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): evolution-2.22.2-1.fc9.x86_64 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Fire up evolution 2. Try and close it as fast as possible Actual results: Evolution churns for a long time when trying to close it. When I open mutt, all of my new messages are now flagged as old. Expected results: Evolution should not change any emails just by opening and closing the program.
This is a direct result of the Maildir format being underspecified. The two relevant paragraphs in the spec are: Files in cur are just like files in new. The big difference is that files in cur are no longer new mail: they have been seen by the user's mail-reading program. and: It looks through the new directory for new messages. Say there is a new message, new/unique. The reader may freely display the contents of new/unique, delete new/unique, or rename new/unique as cur/unique:info. See http://pobox.com/~djb/maildir.html for the meaning of info. Evolution, upon seeing mail in new, adds the mail to it's own database and then moves it to cur. This is correct under this spec (such as it is) -- the mail-reading program has seen the mail, so it is no longer new and it is free to do anything it wants with the mail, such as rename it to cur/unique:info. On the other hand, the Courier Maildir+ format says the following: When opening a maildir or a maildir folder, read the tmp subdirectory and delete any files in there that are at least 36 hours old. Look for new messages in the new subdirectory. Rename new/filename, as cur/filename:2,info. which describes exactly what Evolution does. Mutt abuses the maildir format to offer three messages states (new, old, read) instead of the usual two (unread, read) and and notes the distinction between new and old/read by leaving the mail in the new folder which is suspect under the original spec and wrong under the Maildir+ spec. (Also, this bug should be against evolution-data-server, not evolution, but I lack permission to change it.)
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Is this bug still present on Fedora 11 or later?
Fedora 9 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2009-07-10. Fedora 9 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.