GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 436628
Reminders are not working in Evolution (I DO have my password remembered)
Last modified: 2008-02-06 04:32:28 UTC
Please describe the problem: I'm not getting any reminders at all for scheduled meetings; I've already missed a number of them. Steps to reproduce: 1. Create or accept a meeting 2. Wait for the meeting to come around Actual results: I get no alarm or reminder window, popup, etc. Expected results: I expect to get a notification of my meeting. Does this happen every time? Now it does, yes. When I first created my account I WAS getting alarms, but that only lasted about a day. Then I tried to delete my Exchange account from Evo, and re-add it, and then I got alarms again for about a day, but then I don't get them anymore. Other information: I'm using Ubuntu Fiesty Fawn. This happened with Evo 2.8 (Edgy Eft) as well. I do have my password remembered; I can exit/restart Evo (including using --force-shutdown) and it does not ask me for any password. No amount of shutting down Evo and restarting it, or logging out/in, or even rebooting changes the behavior. Only deleting the Exchange account and recreating it seems to help--briefly. My suspicion is that there's something about one of my recurring meetings that Evo doesn't like; when I first create the account and it hasn't downloaded all my calendar info from the Exchange server it works, but then after a while it chokes on something in my calendar in Exchange and from then on it doesn't work unless I delete the account and recreate it.
I have the exact same bug. Further, meeting dismiss does not do tel the server.
I've been running 2.11.4 and 2.11.5 to test it, and so far I haven't noticed any missing reminders anymore... I'll update the bug if I detect any using this new version.
I have the same problem described in the original comment. I'm running Evolution 2.10.x on Ubuntu Feisty, with all updates applied as of today.
Update: In my case, the problem is better described here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution-exchange/+bug/98625 In short, after unchecking and re-checking my calendars in Edit->Preferences->Calendar and Tasks->Alarms, alarms start working again for that session. However, this workaround doesn't persist.
This still happens with 2.12 but VERY RARELY. It seems Evo can get into a state where it won't see any new mail or show any reminders. Restarting Evo solves the problem (although usually you have to do a force-shutdown to make sure e-d-s etc. is also restarted). I wonder if it's not a symptom of some other issue like the Exchange backend crashing or similar.
I did look into the debug information in evolution-alarm-notify, and it shows there a status of the calendar returned in cal_opened_cb. a) If I 'evolution --force-shutdown' and run alarm notify on the console, then exchange calendars returns 3, which means E_CALENDAR_STATUS_REPOSITORY_OFFLINE, and no events are loaded for this calendar (maybe if it's marked for offline use, then it should work a bit better, because it will read data from local cache). b) If I run evolution, kill alarm notify and run it again, it returns 0, which means OK. Chen pointed me to exchange_account_connect, which is called from exchange-operations plugin, and which is not called from alarm notify at all. In plugin is called in config listener. The exchange is very tight to email account. Thus, if you are lucky, and you firstly run evolution, which calls this function, then alarm notify will use events from the exchange. But if it will start in different order, or at least until the exchange_account_connect is called, the exchange stores are still treated as offline. These are my observations. Maybe I'm wrong with some of them, but it does make sense to me.
Hi Milan; were you looking at Evo 2.12, or 2.21.9x or similar? As I mentioned back in September, Evo 2.12.x (the one that comes with my Ubuntu 7.10 system) has the notifications working well almost all the time. However, I've filed a new bug http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509776 (509776) that no reminders are working at all, ever, in the latest Evolution SVN versions such as 2.21.91, etc. This is a bummer for me!
I tested with trunk, which means 2.21.9x. I also use SVN, but Exchange just for testing.
I feel bug #509776 is the dupe of this. Milan, I dont understand it here. The plugin's thing is no way related to this. Evo's Calendar would be just a client to EDS and EDS would do a exchange_account_connect or what ever is required. FWIW, Evo and EDS both have separate connections with the exchange server. There seems to be some issue, where the connection is not established when the alarm daemon initiates.
I didn't create it as a duplicate, because the problems I had with this in 2.10 were solved in 2.12: reminders work fine for me with 2.12. Then, when I started using the SVN version of Evo, now I'm not getting any reminders at all anymore. Although the symptoms are the same, I felt it likely that the underlying reasons were different. I have a fully debugable version of Evo built here, and I always enable all logging. If anyone wants to give me any hints about what kinds of extra info I could obtain that might help debug the problem, I'm happy to do it.
Paul, I think it is just the timing that made it work and not work. Otherwise, Milan got the core issue.
The problem is that the exchange_account_connect function is never called from eds, it is called only from exchange-operation plugin.
Then how is that the calendar view is able to show appointments? See evolution-exchange/calendar/e-cal-backend-exchange.c. It is called from there. It is the calendar backend for EDS.
Errr, I checked for eds and evo, not for eex sources. My fault. On the first look, it seems like the exchange component thinks the linestatus is false (OFFLINE), either because it still waits for setLineStatus function or because of something else. I will try to investigate more.
Np. I doubt that in one code path, we fail to auth. Just enable debug and run the exchange storage process, you may catch it.
Created attachment 104485 [details] [review] proposed eex patch for evolution-exchange; We found that the exchange_component has its own property to track if line is online or offline, and unfortunately the default value was that the line is offline. As srag suggested, the patch is setting default line status value based on the user's choice from gconf.
Milan nice. Commit to trunk. This ends the era of another long pending issue.
Committed to trunk. Committed revision 1554.
I was very exicted by this and I built a new version of Evo from SVN, that has this patch already applied (I checked to be sure). I used "rm -rf ~/.evolution/exchange ~/.evolution/mail/exchange" and made sure all Evo processes were killed, then restarted. Unfortunately, I still am not getting any reminders :-/. I checked /apps/evolution/shell/start-offline using gconf-editor and it is not set. Is there anything else I need to do here? I'm still concerned that while this bug may be fixed, it is not the same as my bug # 509776 and that is what's causing my problems now. If I run the Ubuntu Gutsy version of Evo (2.12.2 I think), then I get reminders. I get both an icon in the notification area of the panel, and also a dialog that pops up. If I run my SVN version, I don't get anything. Is there anything I can do or show you to help with debugging this?
Can you try these commands, please? $ evolution --force-shutdown $ _prefix_/libexec/evolution/2.22/evolution-alarm-notify and see what is the Calendar Status for the exchange calendars on the console, it should be 0, which means it has been opened (without the patch it showed 3 as offline). If it doesn't work even it has been properly loaded, then we will investigate more. (The "_prefix_" above is your prefix for svn evolution related components.)
I got a 0 for Calendar Status, but there are some really bizarre (to me) other things in the output. I really believe that my problem is a separate bug, and this one is resolved/fixed now, so I'm going to continue this discussion and attach the output to bug # 509776 so please follow me over there! I really, really want to get this fixed. See you there!
Paul, I think this issue is solved totally. But for some reason, the alarm daemon never pops up few alarms. It matches your bug #509776 exactly. We 'll surely track there. Thanks.