GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 781122
Option to Download messages for offline on each Send/Receive
Last modified: 2018-10-25 12:02:30 UTC
Please see: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=777042 for more context I am opening this bug report so that we can track feature requests separately, and not mix them all up. So, Evolution has decent Offline workflow, *if* the user follows steps as instructed in the Documentation, which is: * Check Mail * Before disconnect (or swsusp suspend) click "File" => "Download Messages for Offline Usage" * Go offline * At this point, messages are accessible offline. Following are use cases where it doesn't work well is: Scenario 1 * Using Evo at work. NNTP working fine * Suspend Laptop. Do not switch Evo to "Work offline" * At home, now you cannot work well in offline mode, because in step 2, you did not explicitly choose "Work Offline" before suspend. Scenario 2 * You are at a coffee shop * Something went wrong and you rebooted you computer. * Now open fresh instance of Evolution * NNTP Offline won't work. Because it expect it to be set explicitly to "Work Offline" mode. But given that this expectation of explicitly triggering "Download MEssages for Offline usage" is not practical (in my opinion), I suggest the following: Provide an option in Evolution's settings, or provide a power user hidden switch in the Dconf interface, which when enabled, would club "Download Messages for Offline usage" with "Send/Receive" I have verified this missing feature, up till Evolution 3.22.
Hrm, I forgot to mention this into bug #777042, that suggested "Download message for offline on each Send/Receive" is not needed after the changes in that bug report. Or at least I believe the two scenarios are covered very well without any additional option. The only problem would be after you connect to a network, evolution recognizes some new mails and it also starts the download for offline usage shortly after and then, while it's downloading the next messages, you get disconnected for whatever reason, which would cause some messages not being downloaded for offline. I know, it's what you'd like to avoid. Thus maybe yes, a "power user hidden option" for check of download messages for offline each Send/Receive would make sense. What is not visible from the outside is that the code actually does open each message in the folder, which causes download of those not downloaded, but it also means that it's an expensive operation, both for disk and memory.
Let it be disabled by default and hidden with: $ gsettings set org.gnome.evolution.mail send-receive-downloads-for-offline true Created commit [1] in evo master (3.31.2+) [1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/commit/0d1aceebf5