GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 630523
Evolution messages/mail not marked as read in ubuntu 10.10 beta
Last modified: 2011-10-26 16:31:56 UTC
Evolution does not mark mail as read in ubuntu 10.10 beta. The message font stays bolded and the star in the envolope doesn't disappear even after 1.5 seconds, which is the default time for marking message read. When you try to choose from the Message -> Mark As -> Read (Ctrl+K), it is greyd out. Sometimes mail seems to remain unread in certain folders, always the same ones. However, other times marking messages read works as it should in all folders. All accounts are IMAP and the ones with working folders and not working are on the same service provider, so no difference there. Also sometimes marking messages read starts to work in affected folders as new messages arrive. See Launchpad bug reports: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/636980 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/646856
For me work fine in the same distro, and the same evolution version and the pop acount, imap acount and exchange account.
Please provide exact steps for this (account setup, etc).
I am unsure of what you mean by exact steps, could you please be more spesific if the information provided here is not sufficient. I cannot reproduce the bug at will as it occurs randomly, I have not detected any pattern in it during three weeks of daily use. Sometimes everything is ok with similar usage of other apps and tasks and other times messages won't become read. If the messages can't be marked as read, it is apparent right after starting evolution, this problem won't occur after evolution has been already running for sometime and working fine. Problem also will not disappear on its own (evolution just don't start working ok again). Once, just before I made this bug report in Bugzilla, I had a peculiar behaviour by evolution. I was reading a message and evolution was not marking any messages as read, but as new mail arrived to the folder I was in, the message I was reading, which had previously not been marked as read (even when it should have been), was suddenly marked read, but not the other messages in the same folder that I was in (even though I had read them too). This happened to me only once, that is why I call the behaviour peculiar. Other than that one time, evolution has never marked any message as read while being affected by this bug. - Evolutions' Behaviour Sometimes after starting evolution (perhaps 1 time in 10) new unread messages just stay as unread, it is impossible to mark them as read. Old messages already previously marked as read are shown as they should. However, the newly arrived messages that have been read, become marked as such after restarting evolution (7-8 times of 10) and when restarting evolution won't fix the problem (of read messages staying as unread) restarting the computer does. I don't use hibernation or suspend modes, I always completely shutdown the computer, so that is not a factor in evolution's behaviour. If restart works (app or computer), only those messages that should be marked read are marked as such. It is as evolution remembers that those messages, which were previously showed as unread, have been read, but somehow the GUI just won't update the messages' appearance in the message window, which is also consistant with the 'Mark messages as -> Read (Ctrl-K) being greyed out in the menu. So I think that evolution knows the messages are read, but the GUI just won't update. All mail accounts are IMAP and all mail arrives to the Inboxes from where I manually move it to appropriate folders on that account. All folders are also marked as "copy folder contents locally for offline operations". If you need more information, I'm happy to provide it.
Correction to the above: today evolution worked fine in the early afternoon and now that it has been running in the background for hours, marking new messages read will not work anymore. This might be 'normal' behaviour with this bug as I don't usually keep evolution running in the background. I usually just start evolution when I want to read mail and close it after that. Another point, while being affected by this bug marking already read messages as unread won't work as expected either. You can mark the message as unread, but it won't change its appearance to unread even though the menu entries reflect the change in its status.
I just realized that the messages I have difficulties with all have brackets, such as []{}, in their subject fields. Perhaps those are the source of the problem. I was doing some testing and noticed that evolution could correctly change the status of messages in the affected folders when subject field contained only characters a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and the most used punctuation marks. The change in message status (from read message to unread and back to read again) was showed correctly by GUI for those messages even if no change in appearance occurred for the messages with brackets in the subject. Also after new mail arrived into the affected folder, all those messages that had been shown as unread (but were really read) suddenly changed their appearance to read. After that everything in evolution worked as it should, including changing the status of any message. So Evolution can start working again after a period of not working properly. This behaviour seems to happen only when evolution is kept running for several hours without closing it.
Can you please check again whether this issue still happens in Evolution 3.0.3 or 3.2.0 ?
I changed to Thunderbird so I am unable to check if the bug still exists. You can close this bug if you think it appropriate.
Ah... Thanks for the answer. Closing as INCOMPLETE then.