GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 521956
Groups from Global Address List are incomplete
Last modified: 2010-02-01 14:53:41 UTC
Please describe the problem: When I attempt to see who is in an e-mail group from Global Address List, the list is incomplete. For example for a group with 19 members (as seen in Outlook) in Evolution I can see only two. Steps to reproduce: 1. Go to Contancts 2. Search for a group which contains other groups. 3. Alternatively enter such group in e.g. the To field and right click on it to evaluate the members. Actual results: The group is incomplete. It often misses some members. Sometimes it's even empty. Expected results: See all members. Does this happen every time? Yes. Other information: I'm almost sure this happens with groups which include other groups. It's like the group listing stopped at the point where another group was on the list. I think it didn't happen with 2.10. The problem appears both in 2.12 and 2.21.91.
This bug is old, but I confirm this is still happening here on Evolution 2.26.1 If no one can look into this, I'll likely have to move to Thunderbird instead. Cheers, Justin
Ok, found the reason. If there is an account in the list, but that account is disabled, the list gets truncated at that point.. ..remove that user from the list, and the list is fully available again. Cheers, Justin
*** Bug 490107 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I confirm this bug in Evolution 2.26.1 If an exchange public folder is a member of the group, the list shown in Evolution GAL is incomplete or empty. jack.pack
Evolution 2.26.1 (evolution-exchange/owa/2003 AD domain/Exchange 2003) This bug is not dependent on disable users or groups being members of the affected group. I just went into AD and checked the affected group, and no bad or group members. I added a new member and went back to evolution to compose a message. Now Evolution contains the truncated group with the new member. In fact, it appears that the only two users that evo expands to are the last two members added. (Total members is about 25) This seems to affect two groups that I use, and not others. The other group affected has not had a membership change since I started with the company in June of 2007, but the problem with the particular group has only begun over the last few months.
(In reply to comment #1) > If no one can look into this, I'll likely have to move to Thunderbird instead. Believe or not, this is no argument :) > This bug is old, but I confirm this is still happening here on Evolution 2.26.1 Support for distribution list had been added "recently", a bit more than a year ago, see bug #329505. But I see it doesn't work with group of groups. Otherwise it works fine. It didn't do anything wrong for me when I disabled one of the member in system, I saw his/her address anyway, in the simple group. For testing, I created in the system a (distribution) group, and added there two other (distribution) groups and two ordinary users. Nothing is shown in evolution, even the group-of-groups is recognized as a contact list. (In reply to comment #5) > I just went into AD and checked the affected group, and no bad or group > members. I added a new member and went back to evolution to compose a > message. Now Evolution contains the truncated group with the new member. Art, do you mean your group doesn't contain other group(s), only simple contacts?
Yes, Milan. I administer the Exchange lists so have full access. Both groups know to be affected by this bug on our network have only simple contacts, no groups within groups. There are also no "dead" contacts in the affected groups. One of the two affected groups used to work properly. Now it doesn't. There have been no changes to the group since we started using evolution, so the feature broke with respect to the group; it wasn't the group which changed. I have found that I could get around this problem by creating a personal contact for the group, using the group email address.
Maybe the disabled user was coincidence, but I can vouch that for several different users, the group was only fully expanded to include everyone once we had removed this particular user/address. This may be not the place to say this, it should be in a feature request, but it makes more sense to my mind NOT to "expand" the group. It looks strange to people using Outlook and other mail clients to see an email addressed to lots (and lots!) of people instead of a particular distribution group or department. I work around the problem of incomplete groups by just creating a contact representing the group. This also has the benefit of not expanding the groups, and making emails look more sensible again. However it's a pain to have to manually maintain something like this. I would like to see an option to not expand groups included in evolution. Cheers, Justin
Art, I wonder whether your local cache of the contact got broken for some reason. Could you try to close evolution and all related processes (--force-shutdown), and then move away file in ~/.evolution/cache/addressbook/<your-exchange-addressbook>/cache.xml and let evo recreate the cache, whether new fetch will fix it, please? I'll try to find some other debugging too, maybe running new fetch with E2K_DEBUG=5 on the evolution-exchange-storage process will show what it fetched, but I want to test it myself before. Justin, hmm, I like the idea of not expanding groups, it should work at least for groups which have defined their own emails (it seemed to me that the email address of the group is optional). On the other hand this is just for a completion, and I'm not sure whether the evo internals allow email address of the contact list, as contact lists are always expanded. Showing empty group of contacts in the Contacts view might be considered incorrect for other users. Let me investigate more some time later.
Milan, I actually have 4 addressbook folders: ls -l ~/.evolution/cache/addressbook total 16 drwx------ 2 art art 4096 2008-06-20 10:35 exchange____art;auth=Basic@10.10.1.26_;personal_Contacts drwxr-xr-x 2 art art 4096 2008-11-05 09:38 exchange___art;auth=Basic@10.10.1.26_;personal_Contacts drwx------ 2 art art 4096 2008-11-06 13:55 exchange____art;auth=Basic@mail.rhd.org_;personal_Contacts I deleted cache.xml from the newest one. The problem persists.
Created attachment 141869 [details] [review] proposed eex patch for evolution-exchange; Bah, never mind, I should read the code first, than inventing theories. What I forgot is that the GAL is LDAP-based, but all other address books are DAV based, thus the E2K_DEBUG has no impact on GAL and the contact list support added a year ago has nothing to do with GAL, only with those other addressbooks. I also realized that the GAL has no cache, everything from there are real data. I'm sorry for confusion. This patch fixes two things for me: a) the "Name contains" filter, which didn't work as one was forced to use a prefix search (like "begins with"). This works fine with my ex2k3 server. b) the group expanding doesn't restrict for User objectclasses, but is reading all the members regardless of their object class. With respect of expanding or not expanding the group to respective members, I changed my mind too and incline to Justin's suggestion, but I would like to know opinion of other evo/eex developer before touching this part, as this will more likely influence not only autocompletion part, but also the contact view. The list cannot be edited anyway, thus no big deal probably, apart of not able to see all members.
I vote for Justin's approach not to expand the list. That said, the fact that right-clicking the list name in the to: field of a composer reveals the list members, is assurance with the bug that the list is being expanded accurately. If we go with no expansion, we have to hope for not having the bugs to look out for.
Created attachment 141877 [details] [review] eex part for the option for evolution-exchange; same as before, only with the option to expand/not expand groups to contact lists. It's too late for 2.28 though, as it adds a string and changes UI. Somehow, the change of that option is propagated next start only.
Created attachment 141878 [details] [review] eds part for the option for evolution-data-server;
(In reply to comment #12) > I vote for Justin's approach not to expand the list. Did you mean not expand at all, with no option and such?
(In reply to comment #15) > (In reply to comment #12) > > I vote for Justin's approach not to expand the list. > > Did you mean not expand at all, with no option and such? Options would be better. Not being a coder, I have no idea what is trivial, and what is difficult.
Thank you Milan. Your patch in comment 11 works. Distribution groups with contacts and public folders work as expected. another question: do you know when will be this patch included in the official ubuntu repository?
Jack, as soon as it will be approved, committed to sources and released :) The bad thing is it changes UI, thus the option type cannot be used in 2.28. Maybe we can apply patch from comment #11 there, and it could be, if everything will go smoothly, in 2.28.1. Could I ask you for a test of patches in comment #14 and comment #13 (in this order applied, I guess)? It'll be great to have some real user for testing. It's because that Art thinks the option will be better, and I tend to agree with it. Thanks in advance.
Milan. I have some problems with the patch. The patch 11 works "out of the box". The patches 14 and 13 give me errors at patching. I am new at this so I need help. test@VM-xxx-ubuntu1:~/evolution/evolution-data-server-2.26.1$ sudo patch -p1 < ../eds.patch patching file servers/exchange/storage/exchange-esource.c Hunk #1 FAILED at 143. Hunk #2 FAILED at 188. Hunk #3 FAILED at 238. 3 out of 3 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file servers/exchange/storage/exchange-esource.c.rej Then I changed the lines manually. sudo dpkg-buildpackage No errors.OK. test@VM-xxx-ubuntu1:~/evolution/evolution-exchange-2.26.0$ sudo patch -p1 < ../eex2.patch patching file addressbook/e-book-backend-gal.c Hunk #1 succeeded at 225 with fuzz 2 (offset -2 lines). Hunk #2 FAILED at 1068. Hunk #3 FAILED at 1389. Hunk #4 succeeded at 1379 (offset -22 lines). Hunk #5 FAILED at 1451. Hunk #6 FAILED at 1484. 4 out of 6 hunks FAILED -- saving rejects to file addressbook/e-book-backend-gal.c.rej patching file camel/camel-exchange-provider.c The lines in the patch don't match "exactly" the lines in the file.
(In reply to comment #19) > I have some problems with the patch. Did you revert the previous patch before applying "eex part" patch? These two are mutually exclusive, nd they are touching the same code, thus revert the first patch and then apply the second, to have lines matching. Why the eds part failed for you I've no idea. but if you were able to apply patches manually (remove lines beginning with "-" and add lines beginning with "+", then good. These patches are quite small, thus it should be possible without any big effort. :)
Created commit 76ee950 in eex gnome-2-28 (2.28.1+) of comment #11 It still expands groups in 2.28.1+, but correctly this time.
Created commit 7bef2ea in eex master (2.29.1+) for comment #13, comment #14 And there is an option for master branch. Enjoy.
Not sure if my comment is relevant here but it would be nice for evolution to email the distribution list email address by default and only email the members of the group individually when you click on "expand inline" option. (This is the default Outlook behaviour) I am using Evolution 2.28.1 (Ubuntu 9.10) with Exchange 2003 and when ever I email a distribution list evolution expands the distribution list instead of emailing to the groups email address which makes emailing to large distribution lists annoying for receivers (the ones using Outlook) since they see a huge list in the TO or BC line. Thanks Alex