GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 409288
When invoked from nautilus-sendto, evolution should show the progress dialog for sending the message
Last modified: 2012-08-07 06:38:59 UTC
I reported this bug in ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/84269 The main point: the operation of sending a message in an evolution window, if there is no main window, is asynchronous. You click on "send", the window closes, you don't know anything about the message, where is it, when will it be sent. The best explanation is the use case: I "send-to" a file using nautilus, click on "send", the evolution window closes. I don't think about that since I am in a hurry, suspend my laptop and go to work. I come back in the evening and discover my file is still in my computer outbox, this happened to me and it was not pleasant - that e-mail was rather urgent. If the window just didn't close before sending the message I would not have gone away. I perfectly understand the point of not confirming something that went good, but the success must be observable - so users will "feel" the success. This is always the case on synchronous operations, e.g. shell commands, because you notice that the command finished and if you get no error, that means success. When operations are asynchronous it is no longer true: having evolution send messages on its own reminds me the bad feeling I used to have on debian potato, when I used a local mail server to send e-mail, and had to look at the mail server log to know if the message was sent. A similar use case is file compression in nautilus. I select a bunch of files and choose to compress them into file.tar.gz. Nautilus handles this asynchronous (w.r.t. the GUI) operation in a different way than evolution: if the process completess in less than a couple of seconds, no progress bar comes in the way, while if it starts taking longer, a progress bar appears, de facto making synchronous the asyncrhonous process. If this wasn't true, suppose that the compression took lots of time. I see file.tar.gz in my desktop, but how can I know that it completed so that I can copy it to an usb pen? In fact, nautilus solution, also used when copying files, is nice. Evolution could use the same approach: if the message is sent in a short time, then I see nothing. If it takes longer, the same progress dialog that is used for "send/receive" appears, so that I know I have to wait before going away, also to get any failure. Other information:
Bumping version to a stable release.
Now that the new notification framework is in progress, two notifications could be issued if the evolution main window does not exist. One should say "your message is being sent, do not power off or log out until the message is sent" or something more user friendly but similar, and the other one should inform the user of failure or success of the message. In case of failure, the user should be instructed to open evolution and click on send/receive. Indeed the first notification should be issued only if some seconds passed without completing the pending operation, while the second one should be always be displayed. The printing system does something similar. And, btw, sending an e-mail and printing are very similar in spirit: I am sending data outside the pc so I need to know when I finished to power off the machine.
Looks like a duplicate of bug 598581 to me. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 598581 ***