maemo.org Bugzilla – Bug 3409
RFE: Send-Only Identities in Modest Email Client
Last modified: 2012-03-24 11:42:00 UTC
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DESCRIPTION: Send-only email identities are useful for users that have several addresses forwarding to a single account/mailserver, in order to be able to send messages that appear to originate from the forwarded addresses. Thunderbird supports this via sender identities, other clients have "do not automatically retrieve mail" checkboxes that allow send-only accounts to be hacked together by entering bogus information for the mailserver. Modest appears to support neither method. SOFTWARE VERSION: 4.2008.23-14 (Diablo/4.1) STEPS TO REPRODUCE THE PROBLEM: 1) Look in the preferences of the "Email" application for send-only identity configuration options. OR AS A WORKAROUND 2) Configure account with bogus incoming mailserver information. EXPECTED OUTCOME: 1) Find sender-only settings preferences, similar to those present in Thunderbird under: Edit | Tools ) -> Account Settings -> your incoming account (select a toplevel item in the tree, that is) -> Manage Identities. OR AS A WORKAROUND 2) Be able to disable automatic retrieval for the send-only accounts that have bogus incoming mailserver information entered. ACTUAL OUTCOME: 1) Fail to find the desired options. OR AS A WORKAROUND 2) Receive persistent error messages about the bogus information every time the account is checked. Two error dialogs per account appear every time mail is checked. REPRODUCIBILITY: Always. EXTRA SOFTWARE INSTALLED: None. OTHER COMMENTS: I queried about this issue on Maemo-Users on 7/5 in a thread named "Send-Only accounts in Modest" to confirm that the user community is not aware of an end-user appliable workaround to this issue, and that there are other users interested in seeing a viable solution created. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.15) Gecko/20080623 Firefox/2.0.0.15
A fair bit of discussion around this bug occurred in the maemo-users list. Check the gmane links below for the full threaded discussion: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.maemo.user/11226 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.handhelds.maemo.user/11245 Some highlights, pasted for convenience... --------------------------------- Dirk-Jan.Binnema said: There's currently no built-in way to handle this in modest; the reason for the minimalism is that features tend to confuse many users (e-mail setup is hard!). But obviously, that's not always the right choice for users who know what they are doing... What you *could* do (admittedly, a hack) is to get yourself a pop-account somewhere that does not receive any messages, and use that for the 'send-only' account. --------------------------------- Mike Lococo said: The above may be a general comment, but since you're a Modest dev and it has the feel of "wontfix" about it, I'll make the case for the bug/rfe: 1) Clearly, it's possible to have too many options in an application. However, major/respected desktop mail clients (including Thunderbird, Eudora, and Outlook) have made the decision to support this feature in one way or another (either through explicit sender identity support or by issuing error messages during mail checking in a non-intrusive way). Furthermore, there's nothing unique about the mobile use-case that makes this an undesirable feature. 2) Modest already has methods to shield non-power-users from account setup complexity, namely the wizard process and the built-in presets for major mail providers. A feature like this could default to the common state (no additional sender identities, as is currently the case), and not appear in any of those luser-friendly setup-interfaces while still being available in the edit-account settings to provide the functionality for power users. 3) It would be possible to greatly improve the state of things without any additional options at all by issuing missing mailserver errors during the new message check as an info-alert (is that the right term for the little popup messages in the upper right-corner of the screen that don't require user interaction to clear?), rather than as two separate popup boxes requiring user interaction to clear (one error message + the account preferences box in order to "fix" the faulty account). It's worth noting that Modest already throws an error during account creation if the mailserver is bogus, so it's not necessary to issue such a loud error message during mail-check. Thanks, Mike Lococo --------------------------------- Harri Haataja said: The setup wizard has a "service provider" field, doesn't it? Would it be sufficient to add a "send only" provider there that would be a permanently blank inbox and no connections? Hide this "advanced option" there with no extra UI. --------------------------------- Dirk-Jan.Binnema said: > 3) It would be possible to greatly improve the state of > things without any additional options at all by issuing > missing mailserver errors during the new message check > as an info-alert... Yeah, that makes sense. Maybe leaving the incoming mail server empty would be possible. But still, many users don't even understand the different universes of incoming and outgoing mailservers, and its hard to make it somehow hard for non-technical users to something wrong, while still giving flexibility to powerusers...
If you set up an account manually it is not possible to change the Account type for Incoming mail to "None" (this is the Evolution workaround for this).
*** Bug 7908 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Just bought an N900, and was frankly shocked to see this bug; never even considered that a platform commonly used by F/OSS types wouldn't have this feature. It makes email basically unusable for me and, I'm sure, others - I regularly send email from five or six different addresses via my own mail server. I've seen a workaround which looks like it'll work but really this seems like something that should be fixed.
This is a workaround that I proposed for fremantle: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=62838 It is an ugly hack, but seems to work *most* of the time. The discussion about keeping the email client configuration interface "simple" seems to misunderstand who the is the target market for N900. Hint: the N900 is the most hackable phone in existance.
yep, that's the workaround I saw - most ingenious (nice job!), but it really oughtn't to be necessary :/
Thanks for the tip! I'll try it today. I was already thinking of ditching my N900 for a Android phone, since I really need to be able to send e-mail using different from-identities and signatures. Also, my signatures are 72 characters wide, which does not fit the e-mail app signature field (#11612). The mobile computing experience is quite crippled if it's limited to just reading e-mail and sending using just one from-address/signature. I want to have a phone I can use to read and write e-mail anywhere, anytime and with full e-mail client features. I hope that soon a better e-mail client would be released for some Maemo/Meego platform that I can install on my N900. I guess I an not the only one who considers e-mail the most important app of an smart phone. I hope the client would be open sourced so that others could add the missing features if Nokia does not consider a proper e-mail client a priority themselves.
(In reply to comment #4) > Just bought an N900, and was frankly shocked to see this bug; never even > considered that a platform commonly used by F/OSS types wouldn't have this I had to laugh a bit - GNOME Evolution on Fedora, provided by Red Hat (very likely your employer according to your address) does not have this either. ;-) Anyway, let's please reduce the forum talk here. Plus Maemo5 is now feature-frozen so I wouldn't expect a fix for this.
Uh ? Of course it does, I'm using it for several addresses.
(In reply to comment #9) > Uh ? Of course it does, I'm using it for several addresses. By not setting a server, yeah. Hackish workaround and popular support question.
Both Evolution and Thunderbird have genuine support for identities (with and without custom SMTP servers). Modest does not have this.
andre: "GNOME Evolution on Fedora, provided by Red Hat (very likely your employer according to your address) does not have this either. ;-)" Er, eh? Of course it does. By, as you say, not setting an incoming server. I guess you can call that a 'hackish solution', but it's exactly what the implementation of an identity is: an account with no incoming server. Think about it; that's the definition of a sending identity. A name, an email address, and an outgoing server. If Modest implemented this in exactly the same way, that'd be fine.
otto: the client is open sourced, see http://modest.garage.maemo.org/ (click Development). Unfortunately I'm a QA guy not a coder, so I can't fix this myself.
The Maemo 5 User Interface and Maemo 5 platform components (e.g. libraries) used for the N900 are considered stable by Nokia and it seems that there are no plans for official updates currently, hence nobody plans to work on this enhancement/wishlist request. (And in case you feel like discussing this situation: Nokia Customer Care or http://talk.maemo.org would be the place to do so as you will not reach Nokia officials in this community bugtracker - though all of this is really no news.) Reflecting this status by setting RESOLVED WONTFIX for this enhancement/wishlist request (see https://bugs.maemo.org/page.cgi?id=fields.html#status for status explanations). There is a small chance for issues in those Maemo components that are open source: Contributed patches could be included and made available in the Maemo 5 Community CSSU updates. The Maemo CSSU project is run by a small team of volunteers; see http://wiki.maemo.org/CSSU for more information. So in case that you can provide a patch that fixes the reported problem, please feel encouraged to file a request under https://bugs.maemo.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=Maemo%205%20Community%20SSU . Please note: The Maemo CSSU project is not related in any way to Nokia. ( Tag for mass-deleting bugmail: [cleanup20120324] )