GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 671930
When new messages come in and a vfolder updates the scroll position jumps to the selected message
Last modified: 2014-01-23 20:24:37 UTC
The scenario is reading a virtual folder of the Linux Kernel Mailing List and the display filter is set to show unread messages. New messages for LKML come in at a rate of several per minute. When the IMAP server notifies Evolution of new messages, Evolution updates the vfolder. Then the display updates. Then the scroll position jumps back to the selected message. This interrupts the reader who is scrolling through the long list of messages to find interesting mail. He may have scrolled past thousands of messages since his last selection. To fix this problem, the scroll position should not change after a view update. Probably the view should keep the message currently at the top of the window at the top of the updated view. Either that or the center message. What might be even nicer for reading large vfolders is a way to disable automatic updates for new messages. A header line that tells the user that new messages exist with an update button would be handy. An option in the vfolder setup to switch between manual refresh and automatic might be good. Automatic update can be a problem because new messages may sort into place far above the current reading position and then get marked as read during a mark all read operation without actually being seen.
Thanks for a bug report. You mention few things in once, where some were addressed already, in the current stable, which is 3.6.x. Namely: a) folder update causes center of selected message in message list, this is bug #645476, but you have it in 3.2.x already. I think there was another bug too, but I cannot find it right now. b) be able to disable automatic vFolder update, this is added for 3.6.0 in evolution-data-server commit 76d8bbcd c) notification bar on vFolders with disabled automatic update when there are pending updates, well, I'll rather not do that. The option is about complete disable of automatic update, and even the vFolder knows its "subfolder" changed, it doesn't know whether the change will satisfy the folder's conditions or not, which might be confusing for users. Could you retest the scrolling issue in message list with current stable, please?
I will try to do this. It will be several weeks before I do so however. I will have to either update my Linux distribution or build all of gnome 3.6 from source. Not going to happen any time soon.
Hi Jonathan, if you have time, could you please check again whether this issue still happens in Evolution 3.8.5 or 3.6.4 and update this report by adding a comment and changing the "Version" field and provide information about your distribution? Thanks a lot.
This might be obsolete by bug #645476, thus I mark this as a duplicate of it. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 645476 ***