Yea, this is kinda painful currently but hopefully by 1.2 this will be much easier. We plan on making it so that you can add a new account using "Standard Unix Mail Spool" as the source type and pointing it at a directory and have our code automatically show all the mailboxes in the directory. Currently it will only accept single mbox files as sources.
That will be very nice. Will you also let us point to Maildir's and have it Just Work? Maildir format allows us to continue using procmail and related programs without worrying about locking issues between Evolution and outside mail delivery programs and filters.
It's not really a good idea to use symlinks because Evolution will lock the symlink file and if you have procmail running, it will lock the real mbox file and so if you try and access the same mbox file with both Evolution and procmail, things will end badly for you (ie corrupt mailbox).
Correct. Thats why I plan to switch over completely to Maildir format.
What happened? My symlink was erased! Gone! A new mbox file had been created from the contents of the original.
Did you delete/expunge messages? I presume that you must have because otherwise the mbox would not have been rewritten. The only way to remove
Unfortunately, no. I made no changes whatsoever to the mailboxes. I just entered them to see if the messages showed up, they did, then I exited. Thats when I noticed the symlinks had been blown away, and the resulting "copied" mailbox was bigger in size than the original!
messages from an mbox file is to rewrite it to a new tmp file (minus the messages to be deleted) and then rename that tmp file back to its original name. Unfortunately, UNIX's rename() function clobbers symlinks and thus your problem.
Well, alright. I did some research tonight. Before calling "rename()", a call to realpath() would resolve the symlink to the correct "real" filename, and using that would give the correct result. An extra 3 lines of code (to find out how much storage is needed for the real path, to allocate it, then finally to call realpath()).
Actually, Evolution plays very nice with other mail software on the system - you just have to not use symlinks.
Supporting symlinks is easy. Not supporting them is un-Unixy.
Evolution locks all mailboxes when it goes to access them to avoid mailbox corruption and so as long as the other system mail software does the same (which it should) then they will all live in harmony.
Again, provided one uses Maildir mailboxes, things will be fine. But the thought occurs, Evolution should do its "locking" on the file returned from realpath() too.
Hopefully the symlink-being-erased bug will be fixed soon. I think overall Evolution has made great strides and become a great program. I look forward to further evaluating it when this issue is fixed.
This isn't a bug at all (as explained above).
I vehemently maintain it is a bug, and until it is fixed I can't recommend Evolution.
Cheers!
Jonathan
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