GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 318334
Search by sender and recipients
Last modified: 2009-02-22 01:50:33 UTC
I remember mail threads generally by who was involved and roughly when it occurred, rather than the title. A lot of my mail has a title that sometimes isn't relevant to the actual exchange. Often I need one mail from these exchanges. To hunt down these exchanges quickly I search by sender and recipient using the search bar at the top with the drop-down search type selection ("Sender contains...", "Sender or Subject contain...", "Recipients contain...", etc.). I have to do two searches, one on the Sender, one on the Recipients. The useful information may be in the mail I sent or the mail I received. It would be useful to have a search "Sender and Recipients contain...". I realise I can already do this with the Advanced Search. But this is my 3rd most popular usage of the search bar, after searching on Subject and Sender. Other information: [rich@katrina ~]$ rpm -qi evolution Name : evolution Relocations: (not relocatable) Version : 2.2.3 Vendor: Red Hat, Inc. Release : 2.fc4 Build Date: Wed 10 Aug 2005 23:14:24 BST Install Date: Thu 25 Aug 2005 22:57:07 BST Build Host: decompose.build.redhat.com Group : Applications/Productivity Source RPM: evolution-2.2.3-2.fc4.src.rpm Size : 24937410 License: GPL Signature : DSA/SHA1, Thu 11 Aug 2005 17:10:56 BST, Key ID b44269d04f2a6fd2 Packager : Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla> URL : http://www.ximian.com/ Summary : GNOME's next-generation groupware suite Description : Evolution is the GNOME collection of personal information management (PIM) tools. Evolution includes a mailer, calendar, contact manager and communication facility. The tools which make up Evolution are tightly integrated with one another and act as a seamless personal information-management tool.
should be pretty easy to code, but i guess it won't make it into the main release, because the main target was (and is) to reduce the options to a necessary subset - so this could be a WONTFIX (let the developers decide, not me :-). richard: i'm hopefully going to write this within the next days and attach it here.
If the aim is to simplify the interface, then, fair enough, please close this with WONTFIX. Thanks.
Created attachment 53384 [details] [review] patch to include "sender or recipient contains" to search list [this is NOT intended to become part of HEAD, so not marking it as patch and not diff'ing against cvs] hi richard, the attached patch will add "sender or recipient contains" as the first item of the drop down search list above the message list. apply the patch running a command like this as root: patch -d $prefix/share/evolution/2.2/ < patch_name you have to adjust $prefix (depends on your distribution, e.g. "/opt/gnome" in suse) and the actual patch file name (bugzilla does not keep my original filename), of course. (please note: this applies to evolution 2.4 which i am using. according to http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/evolution/mail/searchtypes.xml there have not been changes regarding the line numbers between 2.2.x and 2.4.x so the patch should apply easily, though i really recommend having a backup of your searchtypes.xml file handy! paranoia can save your day...)
Andre Klapper: That patch works well for me. Thanks! Sorry it took so long for me to test it.
I'd like to take issue with this response. This is my most frequent search in my folders, and I suspect it ranks highly with a large number of users. Furthermore, "the main target was (and is) to reduce the options to a necessary subset" is not consistent with what I see (Evolution 2.6.3, Debian etch) which includes: "Recipients contain" *twice*, "Subject or Sender", "Subject", "Body", "Body or subject" entries. Indeed, there are fourteen entries in this menu based on five attributes (subject, sender, recipients, body), which should include positive and negative for each criterion and four pairs. Surely "Sender and recipients" is at least as useful as "Body or subject" (which is not clearly different from "Message") as the subject words are very likely to be in the body, but the sender is almost never going to be a recipient. And much more useful than the second "Recipients" entry! Shouldn't this be one of the most common/logical pairings of I would really like to see this in Evolution 2.12. Further discussion welcome.
No progress, and no discussion, in a whole year? Too bad. In Evolution 2.22.1 there are still two instances each of "Subject or Sender contains", "Recipients contain", "Message contains", "Subject contains", "Sender contains" and "Body contains", so UI simplification does not seem to be a goal for developers, at least not in this menu. One of the best things about gmail is that it shows conversations so one can easily see the back-and-forth between two (or more) parties. A search for "Sender or Recipients contain" would quickly list all of the conversations a given person is involved in, which would provide a lot of value. I and, I suspect, numerous others would greatly appreciate some attention to such a feature! If you have a good reason not to implement this, please post. If UI simplification is the goal, please eliminate the duplicates in the menu!
Andre, why didn't you mark it as a patch? Anyway, test and feel free to commit to trunk, it shouldn't hurt to have it there. Adam, I do not see those options twice, only 7 basic options there. Did I misunderstand your complain about duplicities? Or are you complaining of the "quite similar rules"?
I'm using Evolution 2.22.3.1 for Debian, which has the following entries in the Search menu (click on binoculars): Subject or Sender contains Recipients contain Message contains Subject contains Sender contains Body contains Message contains Sender contains Body or subject contains Body contains Subject contains Body does not contain Subject does not contain Recipients contain Clearly, there's a lot of redundancy here. I guess this is a Debian bug?
It seems so, because I do not see that on my Fedora box. Can you check in /share/evolution/2.22/searchtypes.xml , there is part called "ruleset" at the end, which is used to populate these items, which are there twice probably. If not, then it's Evolution's bug, which will require new bug, further investigation and so on.
The patch has more or less landed, at least the functionality. I am thus marking the patch as obsolete and close the bug as fixed. Adam, if your issue still persists, please file a new bug :)