The p-Code Machine

Like most folks I pick up my work mail using the IMAP protocol. Evolution is a mail client which understands IMAP. It has recently (and not so recently) gotten a lot of flak about it’s usability, it’s memory hogging, and so on.

However, in the past month Evolution has really become a killer application for me… Seriously! I generally use multiple desktops, this means, even though Evolution periodically checks my IMAP box for new messages, I probably won’t see them, because I’m working on another desktop. Now, Evolution sends messages on DBUS when it has a new (unread) message available. To actually do something with that message you need to install mail-notification and mail-notification-evolution. The mail-notification applet displays a popup whenever such a messages is received. Effectively this means I now can quickly respond to support calls without having to switch desktops all the time.

Besides the notification goodness, there’s another killer feature. Like most companies we have a dedicated support e-mail address, which automatically posts the e-mail in our issue tracking system. However, some customers have the nasty habbit of mailing directly with an employee after they noticed his e-mail address in a reply. Effectively this means such a support call does not end up in the issue tracking system, and could be accidentally neglected. However Evolution comes to the rescue by providing a mail redirect feature. The redirect feature allows you to resend the received message to another address, without touching the sender header. So when redirecting an e-mail to our issue tracking system, the issue tracker system still sends a confirmation e-mail to the original sender (instead of the employee redirecting it). Simple yet very effective.