A month dedicated to elementary Mail
What a month! Passed my exams, went on holiday and still got plenty of time to give elementary Mail some love.
July 2021
In case you are not aware yet: elementary Mail was rewritten from scratch to integrate with the local Evolution Data Server backend. This is the very same backend powering elementary Calendar and elementary Tasks. So, what exactly can you expect from my work this month?
Support for Well Known Folders
Quite a few elementary Mail features rely on well known folders such as Inbox, Drafts, Archive and Sent. That said, it is crucial to correctly detect those folders upon setup - otherwise parts of the user interface will not work as expected. It turned out, detecting those folders is quite a challenge since different mail providers adhere to different naming schemes. However, in the latest version of Mail most of the folders should be recognized correctly most of the time.
Store copy of sent mail in Sent folder
Even though sending emails already worked in elementary Mail, it did not always store a copy of the sent mail in the Sent folder. I fixed this in the latest version of elementary Mail and you can now expect all sent mails to be stored correctly in the Sent folder - regardles off your mail provider. Please note: This was a non-issue for Office 365 and Gmail users.
If you like my contributions, ❤️ Sponsor Me. It would mean the world to me!
Handle reply subject
elementary Mail now correctly displays the subject field whenever you forward or reply to an email. In addition Mail does now handle Re: subject prefixes correctly whenever you hit the reply button.
Save draft
Up until now, the new elementary Mail was not capable of saving a draft. Inevitably mails got lost because they were not sent. Now elementary Mail automatically saves the draft whenever you leave the composer.
Edit draft
Saving drafts is fine to avoid data loss. However, drafts are even more useful if they can be edited again. This feature is exactly what my pull request #626 is going to add. Its not quite there yet, but its nearly done!
Online Accounts: Verify credentials
And there is one more thing: The mail account setup in System Settings > Online Accounts now does verify your IMAP/SMTP credentials before they got stored. So now you can be sure your mail account works correctly in elementary Mail, once the setup in Online Accounts is completed. This fixes a bunch of issues where users did not see any mails at all - even though Online Accounts (falsely) claimed everything is fine.
Last updated
