GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 541487
Mail download and display mechanism
Last modified: 2014-02-23 14:55:00 UTC
I've been using evolution with IMAP account since some time and I feel one thing needs to be improved in evolution. I think evolution downloads mail summary from server, displays the new mail list and new mail notification. But when we click on any new mail to read it, it doesn't show the mail immediately and takes some time to load the mail as actually it is still downloading the mail. The delay is sometimes very much. I think the process should be reversed i.e. first it should download all new mails, then it should display notification and show new mails in inbox. So when we get notification or see new mails in inbox, we can immediately access them instead of waiting for minutes to download the mail.
Did you enable to download mail for offline usage?
Yes, as I would like to have access to all my mails even if I'm offline.
Can this be resolved somehow?
Kind of defeats the purpose of a summary though, doesn't it? I for one receive hundreds of emails a day from various mailing lists, bug notification services, and direct correspondence. But I only read a small portion of those emails, so there's no need to download the full content of messages I'll never read. The delay you're seeing could also be due to the time it takes to /render/ the message, in addition to downloading the content. If you get a lot of HTML mail, disabling automatic image loading could help here.
That point is also valid, summary should pop up immediately in such cases. But how about giving priority to the current message reading thread? So that if mails are still downloading, it'll download clicked message first and render it at earliest.
That sounds reasonable, but I can't guarantee a time frame on this without a patch from an interested contributor.
I'll see if I can help somehow.
This is still a problem till 2.25.X. I think can we take some inspiration from kmail & thunderbird? The mail download/display mechanism is extremely fast in those 2 clients.
I am working on these aspects with imap for evolution 3.0 to improve the speed. I commented the following in one of the bugs we had in Novell bugzilla. The bug was about not able to move the mails in offline since the attachments were missing. But the user has enabled mail caching and expected it work in offline as well. There are two cases here, With offline-sync set on a folder: it would be good to show the message in the message list only after the attachment is downloaded and set the progress message properly. With offline-sync disabled: it would be good to show the message immediately and set the progress message that downloading attachments is in progress. We also need to consider the cases where a user can cancel the operation or if network connection goes off suddenly or if a crash happens, while an attachment is getting downloaded. For these cases probably we can download the message once the user clicks on the message again and show some visual cue that the message is not fully downloaded. I will make a fix for it. Matt, adding a bugzilla topic for imap.
Feel free to create a future milestone. :-P
So what is the exact request here? Please replace the currently unclear summary, looks like discussion here shifted.
Closing - no reply to comment 11 plus request is not actionable.