GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 321016
Separate outgoing mail server settings depending on account identity
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:31:17 UTC
Currently, out going mail servers (OGMS) are handled as part of the email account. While this is workable, it has some limitations. For example if you have one email address, but need to use two different outgoing mail server (for different locations with different ISPs) then you need to create to mail accounts, one for one OGMS, one for another. Multiply this by eight of nine email address and four locations (and even taking into consideration that you might not need a differenct OGMS for each email address) and you've got a quite a mess of configurations to handle. I would suggest that Evolution should handle OGMSes in the same way that it handles signatures. Signatures are created in a seperate part of the settings tool, and then you can select a default signature for each mail account, and also change the signature on the fly when creating new mail. OGMSes should be handled in the same manner. A seperate area in the settings should be used to manage OGMSes, and then a default OGMS should be selected (and changed) in each account setting. It should also be possible to select a different OGMS for each message. In addition to this, it should be possible to have an overriding OGMS depending on location. So when you connect at a particular location, you can state that all outgoing mail should go through a particular OGMS instead of using the predefined default. In fact, this might be better than having a setting for default OGMSes in each mail account, and if the location could be detected on the fly, then the OGMS could be handled without user interaction, only prompting with mail server to use if the currently selected server can't be determined or doesn't work. Doing this would dramatically simplify mail account/OGMS management, and could also help to deal with situations where email won't send because of OGMS problems or rejections.
I think kmail does this very well. It logically separates identity from accounts. (see the "Identities" and "Accounts" tabs in its configuration window). However each identity can have a default OGMS. Accounts are divided into receiving and sending. This is definitely a desirable feature, as I have 4 email addresses (identities) and access to 3 smtp servers, all restricted to their subnets, (accounts), so would need to create 12 accounts entries in the current Evolution.
I'd suggest changing the title of this bug report to; "separate outgoing mail server settings from account identity"
I've just tried the lastest Evolution 2.12 and its ashame to find that identity is still tied to accounts. :-( There is no way to setup smtp servers that are tied to and email address or to use different email address with different smtp severs (or other transports, sendmail etc) I think that accounts (recieving and sending) really need to seperated from indenty (email address etc).
I'm sure the developers would accept a patch
*** Bug 424700 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I've tried the latest evolution development release, 2.21.92, and I still need to create 12 accounts to use the 3 subnet restricted stmp server I have access to with the 4 email addresses I use. I really hope identity and accounts are seperated in a coming release soon.
Still a issue in 2.26.1.1
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new enhancement request ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.