Allegedly, on or about 29 March 2018, home user via users sent:
Earlier this afternoon, from Thunderbird running on a windows-7 box,
I sent 2 messages from yahoo account #1 to yahoo account #2, each
with different few-megabyte (not mega-pixel) picture attached. I
also sent 1 message from yahoo account #1 to yahoo account #3; it had
one few-megabyte picture attached (different from the 2 sent to yahoo
account #2).
1. I booted up my Fedora workstation.
2. As soon as it was ready, I logged in.
3. As soon as that was done, I launched Evolution.
4. As soon as that was done, I signed in to yahoo account #2.
5. As soon as that was done, I selected the one of the new messages
from yahoo account #1. It downloaded in under 5 seconds.
Sounds reasonable.
6. I then immediately asked to display the picture in "xv".
The
picture was immediately displayed.
Again, good. Evolution is quite quick at decoding enclosed/attached
files
...[snip similar events]...
In Thunderbird, these downloads would have taken over half an hour.
Definitely not right. I might expect a few seconds difference between
some mail programs, nothing more.
Other things that I notice in Thunderbird:
* Sending a message with an attached picture is a few times faster
than downloading a message with an attached picture. This is despite
my ISP's download speed being about 10 times faster than the upload
speed.
Do you have junk filtering (and similar things) enabled? They can slow
things down (not by that amount, though), as each message is checked.
There'd probably be some remote access involved, too, with databases of
anti-spam information.
* Downloading a Sent folder message with an attached picture is
clearly faster that downloading an Inbox message with an attached
picture.
Do you also have filtering rules? (e.g. Auto-sorting mail into
different folders.) Some programs are extremely slow when filtering
incoming mail.
* Downloading a new or very recent Inbox message with an attached
picture seems to be faster than downloading an old Inbox message with
an attached picture.
Probably due to caching. There'd be a brief check to see whether you
already have the data, whether your data is the same as the servers,
then you'll just view your previously cached data.
Evolution never showed any messages as having empty bodies. (yahoo
account #2 is the account to which Fedora users list messages are
sent.) Most such messages do show up as having empty bodies in
Thunderbird (the issue of this thread). So the problem is not just
yahoo e-mail; it's not the operating system or display manager. That
leaves Thunderbird at least in part. There definitely seems to be at
least two problems here.
I can't recall if you said whether you had a pristine install. (Fedora
as a new install or over an old install. Thunderbird as it comes, or
with extra add-ons installed, etc.) Nor whether you'd looked at the
raw message source, to see whether it'd been downloaded and simply
wasn't being rendered in the viewing window.
I know that, at times, you do get mangled mail, and some mail clients
are better at handling that than others. Multi-part mail (such as
large digests) are probably going to be the worst culprits.
Tim:
Evolution apparently starts some processes either on boot-up or on
login. I did not put anything in my login scripts. Where are these
processes being launched?
I'm using MATE: System menu,
Preferences sub-section,
Personal sub-sub-section,
Startup Applications menu item
Or, from the command line: mate-session-properties
Old Gnome 2 was virtually the same. KDE will have a similar feature,
likewise with some other desktop environments.
In the startup applications, there's an Evolution Alarm Notify app.
That'll partially fire up Evolution as you login to a session.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 4.15.10-200.fc26.x86_64 #1 SMP Thu Mar 15 17:14:41 UTC 2018 x86_64
Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted.
There is no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see
the messages posted to the mailing list.
Evolution keeps on telling me that it's refreshing,
but I still want to go and get a drink.