I don't particularly love recommending a "solution" like this, but I'm thinking of non tech-savy users who can't be expected to kill processes or run "evolution --force-shutdown" all the time.

When I ask to quit an app, I expect it to quit, whatever happens, within 15 seconds maximum.

Currently, and for the past few releases (3.12 going all the way back to 3.6 and such), about half of the time where I want to quit it there's always "something" hanging up Evolution, be it a permanently stuck "refreshing folders for $account", "reconnecting to server for $account", "checking folder INBOX" or something like that. Evolution has this tendency to hang a lot in its IMAP operations. When it does, I naïvely click the Close button in the hope that it stops whatever it's trying to do, shuts down and restarts from a clean state.

And most of the time when I do that (everytime?) I end up needing to alt+F2 and run "evolution --force-shutdown" and wait 10-20 more seconds. Then this brings the question: why not do that for me in the first place?