GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 241477
Message color cannot be removed once applied to a message
Last modified: 2018-07-23 19:32:25 UTC
I change the color of messages in many of the filters that I have set up. Often I want to reset the message color back to the default black. HAVE YOU EVER TRIED TO DO THIS???? It is just about impossible; the only method I have figured out is to design a new rule that just restores the color and apply it the message in question. Pretty bogus. How about making it an option in the right-click popup menu? At least make it appear in the "Actions" or "Tools" menus ...
I agree. Not very simple or forgiving...
I'll tentatively mark this 1.6 so that it will be factored into my UI planning queries for the next major Evolution release (where next== the release following the release that we're currently working on).
Moving all 2.0 milestones to 1.5.x, please retarget if needed.
Not a regression and its a UI change so we will punt this from 2.0 due to lack a time.
honestly, I think the ability to colour-code mails from the filters needs to be removed and replaced with just the labels. there's at least 1 other problem with colours right now which is that if you have both a colour and a label set for a message, which colour shows through? I think the label colour "overpowers" the filtered colour right now, but that could cause confusion. I think I've even seen a bug saying that the priority should be reversed. it might be interesting to see if users use both "colours" and "labels" and to figure out why they do so - is 5 labels too few? if so, maybe we can extend it to something better? (growable?) anyways... food for thought.
this is possible from the context menu, but it's indeed missing in the main menu. note that we're in UI announcement period, i'm going to take a look at this if i find time.
punting - this will not happen until monday (UI freeze). bug 269852 could be the same problem.
Bumping version to a stable release.
*** Bug 704361 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Having fallen for the use of setting the colour from a filter, I now humbly ask for a procedure to remove the colours again :) Even just telling me which files to edit would be a great help. (I'm using maildir.) I'm afraid that if I create a filter to set the colour to black, that it won't truly revert to "default" but rather it will set the colour to black, and the remnants will live on until a future change stuffs something up just for these emails. The behaviour as of 3.4.4, is that a label overrides the colour. Removing the label returns the colour to the one that was set by a filter. I'm not certain that the feature needs to be removed as per comment 5. I also have a filter that sets emails to bright red if they contain hooks to spyware. I'm unlikely to ever want a special label for that (as it happens very rarely), or to remove the colour in the future. But I do want an option somewhere in the UI, that would allow me to unset the colour in the event that it shouldn't have been applied.
(In reply to comment #10) > Having fallen for the use of setting the colour from a filter, I now humbly ask > for a procedure to remove the colours again :) On all colored mail, run a filter to unset the color?
I don't see a way to unset the colour, I only see a way to set the colour to black. Does this have the same effect as if the colour had never been changed? In word processing software, for example, setting the colour to black is usually different from leaving it set to default.
Color values are stored in the folders.db database and message meta-data. I don't see a way to remove the color tag once it's been applied. So it looks like coloring it black is your best bet until I can remove this misfeature.
Correction: *as* message meta-data
I have tried the fix, and setting to black is not equivalent to leaving as default. Default text has a large proportion of its pixels at various grey levels due to anti-aliasing, whereas setting to black has most, if not all, pixels set to black. So it has the effect of being rendered darker than default. I see that folders.db is a binary file. How can I manually remove entries? Also, I checked on the result of another filter rule that was setting the colour in a way that I intended not to remove - a flag for spyware. Those emails were not coloured, so I guess the metadata got lost when converting from mbox to maildir, or at some other version update. Not cool when this is a warning not to hit "load images". So whatever is the outcome, please ensure that this metadata is a) not permanent, and b) not lost by accident.
Added Assign Color.../Unset Color into Message->Mark As menu and in the message context menu. Created commit 6b46f0e094 in evo master (3.29.90+)