On Die 08 Aug 2000 Melle C. Geers wrote: > It would be a nice feature if one could toggle on/off line status (like > in some Mac "mail-clients" and their Windows counterparts (OE NM)). > b) is this feature wanted? Sounds nice. But maybe there's even a way to tell automatically if you're online (I mean a /clean/ way)? Regards Daniel
(*** This bug was imported into bugs.kde.org ***) Package: kmail Version: 1.1.62 (KDE 1.92 Beta >= 20000720) Severity: wishlist It would be a nice feature if one could toggle on/off line status (like in some Mac "mail-clients" and their Windows counterparts (OE NM)). This should do the following things: Toggle intervalled check for new mail Toggle default send now/send later Maybe send outbound mail on going online (Allow sending of local mail always) The button to switch should be easily reached (main toolbar). I know this can also be configured in sendmail/fetchmail (and keep kmail network transparent) but another way to acomplish this wouldn't hurd (and purists/non-modem-users should be able to turn this feature off completely). Since there is a freeze maybe something for the following version? I'm willing to code this myself but: a) should I wait 'till some post-release date? b) is this feature wanted? Cheers Melle
On Tue 08 Aug 2000 Daniel Naber wrote: > On Die 08 Aug 2000 Melle C. Geers wrote: > > It would be a nice feature if one could toggle on/off line status (like > > in some Mac "mail-clients" and their Windows counterparts (OE NM)). > > > > b) is this feature wanted? > > Sounds nice. But maybe there's even a way to tell automatically if you're > online (I mean a /clean/ way)? IMHO: nope. Some methods could be: To check for a certain route on a certain host which is very site-specific. For example: on my kde-2 box there is always a default route but it just leads to my gateway/firewall which has an anolog modem. Using rsh/ssh-expect I should be able to determine if my gateway has an outbound route but this is not really my definition of /clean/ ;-) Slightly better would be hooking into kppp but this would be unusefull for people like me (running more 'puters on a lan). Besides I don't even use kppp. Another solution would be to make the whole of kde "offline aware" with all kind of troubles (what to do with a lan which kio_slaves should be aware of this etc etc) as a bonus. Regards Melle (who's sendmail.cf is fsck'ed up hence this whislist item)
well.... on the other hand: windows can do it so there's got to be a way to know whether there is a connection or not. Whether it's clean I don't know. However might not be possible due to architectural reasons in Linux no idea. But it sure would be nice to get rid of that "failed to send"-dialogue popping up every x minutes while there's sth. in the queue. Stephan
Hi > windows can do it so there's got to be a way to know whether there > is a connection or not. Windows can only tell if it's online if it is dialling up itself. When you have your own LAN with a dedicated dial-up-router the client is alway *online* but only in your LAN. Whether the LAN is currently connected to the internet is a completely different thing. Of course if the dial-up-router is auto-connecting whenever there is the need you can assume "always online". However in some environments auto-dialing is not wanted since a home-phoning client (think of Windows XP) will trigger an outbound connection regularly thus increasing your phone bill (well if you have a flat-rate this is not a problem but solely a security risk). > But it sure would be nice to get rid of that "failed to send"-dialogue > popping up every x minutes while there's sth. in the queue. Maybe there should be something like "Do you want me to continue to try to send the queued messages?" Volker
But then this bug should be assigned to KDE whole not only to kmail, shouldn't it? And yes I strongly support of idea to make whole KDE offline/online state aware.
Just for the record, these are living bugs/wishes with offline in title: bug 8206, bug 67287, bug 58225, bug 66741, bug 63443, bug 67010, bug 67966,bug 69281, bug 69779, bug 64912, bug 68483, bug 70339, bug 71077, bug 71113, bug 49217, bug 71076.
> Just for the record, these are living bugs/wishes with offline in title: ... Nice; but only: 69281 is relevant, the others have nothing do with the feature request written above. And with more and more people going broadband/adsl (i.e. always on), this feature request is loosing its need.
*** Bug 74110 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
> And with more and more people going broadband/adsl (i.e. always on), this > feature request is loosing its need. > It is a must in case you've a Notebook and you read/write mail while in train or something. More, it's not simply "nice": I'll never use a mail client which doesn't support offline mode.
Created attachment 6477 [details] Adds an "offline-mode" to kmail I added some offline functionality to kmail, to avoid these annoying messageboxes when kmail is open and no network connection is established. You can toggle it with a button in the toolbar and you can also configure if you want to start kmail in offline-modus in the preferences (settings->network->receiving). Local mail (maildir and local) is checked normal. If the button is toggled from offline to online, every enabled account is checked. Try it out and tell me what you think.
> Adds an "offline-mode" to kmail This is only a small part of the game. For online/offline you have to care about (list is probably not complete): - mail checks - selecting online imap folders - getting emails for online imap - sending emails - syncing for disconnected imap - imap idle commands - subscription - returning jobs that have been kicked off in online mode and return in offline mode - pop downloads Carsten
Ok, right. But this was all I could test here, I have no imap mail account available. Anybody can expand the patch to support this. To the list: -mail checks works with explicit and timed mailchecks on (pop, local, maildir, imap is untested.) - pop downloads what do you mean with that? BTW: what about HTML images that are reloaded from the internet, how should we handle this? How is this handeled in other clients that support offline mode? Perhaps this discussion should take place in a mailinglist to make it public. Falco
With regard to the question of how to detect automatically whether you are online or not: how about letting the user specify a shell-script which returns (say) 0 if offline, 1 if online?
*** Bug 25879 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Interval mail checking makes sense only when your mail server is reachable, the password is ok, etc, i.e. when it's known to succeed. It's a convenience background job after all. If automatic mail checking fails, it will give you an annoying error message every n minutes. The user will think something like "Hell, I KNOW you can't reach my mail server, 'cause I happen to be offline right now. But I don't want to disable the feature because usually I'm online." The expected behavior is to pop up an error only once saying "Error X while checking for mail on account Y. Now disabling automatic mail checking until you restart KMail or a manual check is successul." As a side note, it would also be nice, if accounts on which the user hits cancel on the password dialog would be excluded, too.
*** Bug 88205 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 91133 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 93509 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Agree with Carston. Offline in this thread seems to have two meanings: *) Can't reach the network: This basically means that the client gracefully sits idle instead of CPU-hogging (like Thunderbird sometimes does) trying to reconnect. This can be resolved cleanly by a simple IMAP/POP3-ping so-to-speak. Every <insert favorite timing interval here> seconds a thread wakes up and checks the availability of the default mail server. TCP Connect or possibly even ping (configurable) should prove sufficient. It also strikes me that it is most valuable to check the default gateway's availability, with slightly more value checking the server. Just my $0.02 *) Offline mode, including the above definition, but pre-emptive offline (ie. We tell it to go offline *before* the network goes away). This then includes (ok, this is actually the most value anyway) downloading email to offline IMAP folders. This of course infers that we must be able to flag IMAP folders for offline use. As Marco (and others) have already mentioned, this is one of the primary values to Offline Mode. Who cares if I have to close KMail if I'm not able to use it?
It's really annoying to open kmail when there are timers set to check mail but I'm offline and KMail keeps popping up endless dialogs to tell me that it can't reach the mail server. No kidding!! There needs to be a way to tell KMail that I'm "offline" manually.
SVN commit 438202 by mdouhan: Online/Offline status for KMail Add menuentry for going online or offline and when in offline mode, stop network activity such as mailchecks, at this stage recieving mail is stopped and in the future sending mail will be queued and other network activity will be on halt. This can also be controlled by dcop dcop kmail KMailIface stopNetworkJobs dcop kmail KMailIface resumeNetworkJobs
SVN commit 438714 by mdouhan: Selecting online IMAP folders is not possible in offline mode This means the last of Carstens list has been implemented BUG:7765 M +19 -0 kmmainwidget.cpp --- trunk/KDE/kdepim/kmail/kmmainwidget.cpp #438713:438714 @@ -1756,6 +1756,25 @@ } mFolder = aFolder; + + if ( mFolder && mFolder->folderType() == KMFolderTypeImap && kmkernel->isOffline() ) { + const KCursorSaver idle( KBusyPtr::idle() ); + int rc = + KMessageBox::questionYesNo( this, + i18n("The selected folder is an online IMAP folder, " + "KMail is currently in offline mode. " + "How do you want to proceed?"), + i18n("Online/Offline"), + i18n("Work Online"), + i18n("Work Offline")); + + if( rc == KMessageBox::No ) { + return; + } else { + kmkernel->resumeNetworkJobs(); + } + } + if ( aFolder && aFolder->folderType() == KMFolderTypeImap ) { KMFolderImap *imap = static_cast<KMFolderImap*>(aFolder->storage());
But does this allow us to specify folders we'd *like* access to offline? I mean it's nice not to have KMail so confused but what makes it of any value? Can we *write* mail offline?
All folders that can possibly be available in offline are automatically made available, including dimap, and local mailboxes, And yes you can compose emails in offline mode, they will be queued until you go online and then automatically be sent depending on your KMail configuration and there are help messages along the way telliung you exactly what is going on.
Not sure what "dimap" is. The other problem with the "Offline IMAP" I've seen is that my email account is several GB and I only want to make certain folders for offline mode. Is this still the case or is this a new function allowing something more like Thunderbird? If so, what version of KMail/Kontact will we see this functionality? (best guestimate)
dimap is offline IMAP. Making certain folders offline is not a solution, if KMail is offline that means there is no network wich means that no synching can take place. What you are after is a per folder config option to not synch that folder, there is a wish for that already on bugs.kde.org and I might look at it during akademy but it has nothing to do with KMail offline mode. I do not know what thunderbird does and how they do it, if they do it well please tell me :) if they do it badly then please tell me so I can avoid doing it :)
Matt Douhan wrote: > dimap is offline IMAP. > > Making certain folders offline is not a solution, if KMail is > offline that means there is no network wich means that no synching > can take place. > > What you are after is a per folder config option to not synch that > folder, there is a wish for that already on bugs.kde.org and I > might look at it during akademy but it has nothing to do with KMail > offline mode. Per-folder choice, yes. Whether it is an exlusion or selection for sync matters little, although having both options would be nice... like having a list of all folders with a check box beside each for sync or not, and a button to select or deselect all. And a default setting for newly found folders. > > I do not know what thunderbird does and how they do it, if they do > it well please tell me :) if they do it badly then please tell me > so I can avoid doing it :) Thunderbird has an "Online/Offline" button in the lower left hand corner of the window. While connected to the network you can click this button to go offline and synchronize your folders (which is done when a folder is accessed normally, but only for that folder). There is a prompt for this behavior (which I leave on), allowing me to choose whether to sync or not when switching modes. This allows me to avoid attempts to sync when I've already lost network connectivity. When I go back on line, any emails I've written in offline mode are sent (also promptable). If dimap and offline mode handle this more gracefully, more power to them. So long as I can disable the syncing of certain folders, it sounds like dimap is the way to go with KMail/Kontact. Thank you, Matt. - -- Matthew Carpenter matt@eisgr.com http://www.eisgr.com/ Enterprise Information Systems * Network Server Appliances * Security Consulting, Incident Handling & Forensics * Network Consulting, Integration & Support * Web Integration and E-Business -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.5 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFDCaMNso9lqh4MragRAjDUAKCJHM5AdwMDD36S+8UYdGKEBLZrywCfRTev lWhAtHmNPBLHlthyGtKWeNY= =N7hr -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Hello again, all. I'm running 1.9.1 through Kubuntu (great distro) Currently I'm seeing the "Work Offline" option, but failing to see it's value. Now, instead of seeing "Unknown Host: xyz" or some other annoying message because my network is gone.... I now get "You're working offline, would you like to work on line?" NO! SHUT UP! I'M TRYING TO WORK DANGIT! Sorry. Didn't mean to outburst like that... but you get my point. I am *so* appreciative of all the hard work you guys have done to create the single best desktop environment and *really* improving Kmail from the old days of "oh, you needed that inbox mail?" into a quite decent email client. Wrapping it in Kontact has even made it more usable and verging on "excellent"! So please don't take this (pseudorant) the wrong way. I just need kmail to take a hint when I tell it to piss off :) Vernacular aside, this translates into: Maybe warn me once that we lost the server (option). But don't tell me again until after we've connected to the server again and lost connection. When working offline, stay that way. Stick an icon in the client that indicates "OFFLINE MODE", maybe even use red for offline, green for online. But please do not prompt me for going back online. I don't care that I have two dimap accounts which poll for changes every 5 minutes. Just stay offline until I tell you otherwise... or unless you can actually reconnect to the server (that, by the way, is not necessarily a bad thing). I really like the popup which said "you've lost connection to the server, check this box to avoid future notifications". I was totally thinking that I'd not get prompted again, and I wouldn't even need offline mode! Anyway, please take this for what it is, a humorous bit of heart-felt feedback, not a criticism of you guys. Thank you once again. Matt
I would also suggest to reopen this bug. This nag-message is quite annoying. I would be usefull may be to ask this, if I am online with the computer. But if I am not, this is annoying. Kmail does not seem to know the status of the system. Would be great if at least the message could be turned of and so that is clear that I am offline there would a offline version of the icon.
Maybe duplicate the "Working Offline" status to overlay the "Send/Receive" message box as a reminder. Default should be "Work Online" after installation.