Evolution does not remind unread emails

[Michael De Roover]

On Thu, 2020-11-12 at 22:20 +0100, Fontana Nicola wrote:
> I'm having this issue for more than one year now, so the version
> really
> does not matter.

If there's a bug or regression in software, it's useful to determine
between which commits it may have been introduced. For a single version
it may narrow it down to a couple dozen to a couple hundred commits,
and across versions it does that for.. well, those software versions.

> At the beginning I thought it was evolution and I played with various
> settings (included the delay you mentioned) without luck. After that
> I
> ports and server settings). Then I noticed that closing and reopening
> evolution within the same session works, so I thought this is related
> to the way evolution is closed by the session manager.
> 
> I'm not blaming xfce4-session itself: maybe it is just some old
> setting
> hanging around. Using a rolling distro means your system is up to
> date
> but the home directory can be full of legacy stuff, and maybe some of
> that crap is getting in my way.

Hmm, maybe it'd be useful to do some cleanup there then... Evolution
seems to be storing its settings in ~/.config/evolution. Out of
curiosity I've also checked between 2 workstations that were both
running Evolution, if and after how long it would take before an email
would be marked read on the other client after reading it on one of
them. After the 1.5s delay in the first client, the second took around
a second to also mark it read there. Manually refreshing the inbox was
not required. I guess that's more or less the behavior Evolution should
exhibit. The issue could be down to either configuration or Arch being
more bleeding edge I guess... Maybe a bug did get introduced at some
point that Debian isn't seeing yet.

> I hoped that someone already met this issue before. I use filters
> heavily and always move emails from IMAP accounts to local folders
> before reading them, so maybe this workflow is not so common.

Local folders are not synchronized to the mail server, so this may
explain the behavior you're seeing as well. I use folders to separate
mail from the mailing lists, stored on folders on my internal mail
server. In those I'm not seeing this behavior because of the IMAP
command that gets sent to the mail server to mark an email read, which
I mentioned earlier. Perhaps consider if it's viable to store the
folders on the mail server.

Hopefully this could help to solve the issue.

-- 
Michael De Roover <xfce at nixmagic.com>