GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 346728
Exchange starts with Public Folders / Check all Folders enabled
Last modified: 2007-01-19 13:04:29 UTC
Please describe the problem: If you work for a big company, your public folders hierarchy might be quite large. If you create a new account in exchange 2.6.2, the first thing that happens once you pushed the accept button is that the exchange connector starts copying the entire folder hierarchies, including the public folder, into .evolution/exchange/<your account>/subfolders/. This effectively blocks the usage of the account, since it never finishes before all resources (disk, memory) are completely exhausted or you stop evolution with --force-shutdown. There is no visible way to disable the "check in all folders" behaviour. Steps to reproduce: 1. create a new exchange account on an exchange server with a deep public folder hierarchy Actual results: all public folders and all its subfolders are loaded. Expected results: only the top hierarchy of the public folders are loaded by default. Does this happen every time? yes. Other information:
I've seen this too. This problem can also be seen after an account is successfully set up, or when migrating from 2.4.x to 2.6.x or newer. On each launch, evolution will scan all the public folders on the server, and create a directory and xml file, etc. in .evolution for each one. Close and open again, and it will do so again. Got to Folder->subscriptions and select your exchange account, and it will scan the public folders again, and renew them on disk, again. If one is lucky enough to have enough memory, the process of scanning folders, etc. will complete, and evolution will be usable until closed. It seems to hit a timeout around 10 minutes or so though, and throw a crash dialog if the evolution-exchange back-end process is still working. In fact, if that happens, the evolution-exchange storage process will keep on scanning, even after evolution is quit. So far I've seen this in versions up to 2.7.3.
Also seeing this with Evolution 2.6.2. I killed my .evolution/ and .gconf/apps/evolution folders, uninstalled eds, evo, and evo-exch, and rebuilt them. I then killed the processes after about 5 minutes into the folder scan, and I have 311MB of garbage in my public/ folder tree, with 79019 files and 89989 directories.
Have the same problem, using exchange that way is a real pain. Even worse evolution seems to clear out all the cache files when starting up, which further adds to the startup time
I have this problem too, making it impossible to upgrade Evolution, and heck even any of Gnome for that matter because they seem to be interdependent. When I start evolution, it immediately starts downloading the 300MB+ of public folder files. I upgraded via yum... and then had to downgrade to previous versions to fix.
Evolution will download public folders only if it is already subscribed to. Previously it was never downloading sub folders (if any) and users who wanted to access the public sub folders were not getting it. We are working on downloading them only on selecting a folder. Meanwhile, as a workaround you can unsubscribe to them if you are not using them. Hope to fix this issue soon.
I can never get to this workaround. Evolution never becomes usable for me since it is waiting on the download to finish, and eventually times out. Can anybody else unsubscribe from the folders? So far, this is a show-stopper for me.
I wonder if its possible to subscribe a user by default to all public folders? I've never knowingly subscribed to any public folders via evolution or outlook, but it still tries to download all of them at startup. As noted above, its impossible to get the dialog up to unsubscribe from all of them either.
The workaround will not work, since to unsubscribe from folders, evolution first wants to know the entire folder hierarchy. It assumes you want to subscribe, and it needs something to offer to you. The problem starts, when more than the top level of each hierarchy will be cached. That kind of folder caching needs to be configurable (by command line switch, gconf property etc., since one cannot access the ui in some cases). OK, the process is somewhat slower if you open a hierarchy and the connector needs to investigate the next level online. But people are used to certain delays if they work online. If they work offline, it is not possible to descend into unsubscribed hierarchies. Pitty. But do you really want to import half of the usenet into a local folder tree just to make that possible? no joke, one of our branches in India mirrors some usenet groups since they do not allow internet access... I think the configuration shall be a variable, that forces evolution to limit the descent into folder hierarchies to a certain level. Do this for every connector, if someone faces a similar problem on IMAP one day. It also avoids to be caught in a folder alias loop.
I have reverted the patch for showing the sub public folders in 2.6.3. So 2.6.3 now should work like 2.4.x. Please check with 2.6.3 which will be available next week. Reopening bug #268412.
Cool! Evo 2.6.3 works for me, up and running in 25 seconds, not 20 minutes. Thank you! (Any chance the same reversion could go to 2.7.90??) Bill
I just tested preliminary Debian packages for 2.6.3-1, they work nicely. Startup and usage even seem to have improved since 2.4. (and 2.0 anyway, which I had to use in Debian in the meantime). Thank you very much! Hanno
2.9.4 is out and this time has more updates on Exchange connector. Exchange connector, now, has an option like other providers that user can choose to check mails in all folders, which will not be selected by default. Also, this version of Exchange-connector has performance related fixes, esp, w.r.t public folders. Check it out and let us know.
2.9.4 talking to exchange is much much better. Thank you!