[Techtalk] [Fwd: Re: Evolution won't talk to IMAP server]

[Patrick Olson]

On Fri, October 17, 2014 1:37 am, David Sumbler wrote:
> Thanks for that (and to Lisa too, for her off-group reply).  Clearly
> this is the problem.  I'm surprised that Fastmail didn't send out a
> general email highlighting the problem, although perhaps that would just
> be annoying for most of their subscribers who aren't using SSL3.0.

Glad to help. It doesn't seem like FastMail emails customers much. In the
past year, I've only received one update from FastMail that wasn't through
the blog, vs. about 30 through the blog. This includes  their response to
that OpenSSL "heartbleed" mess last spring, and even some service changes.
Might be good stuff to know about. :)

> Ubuntu 12.04 is supposedly an LTS version, so perhaps an updated version
> of Evolution will appear, although I shan't hold my breath.

For the error message you mentioned in your original email ("You must be
working online to complete this operation") they have 9 bugs
(254563,250540,663785,647287,730757,590366,732957,708175,732850) but none
of them mention SSL. Point being, I'm not sure they even know about this
particular scenario yet. The bug tracker for GNOME projects, including
Evolution, is at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/ if you want to look into it
further and/or file a bug report.

Also, perhaps Evolution has some options you can set for SSL that might
work around this? I'm thinking SSL 2 instead of SSL 3, but don't know how
secure it is, and also not familiar with Evolution settings.

> Meanwhile I shall have to decide whether I can learn to love Thunderbird
> (which I doubt), or whether to switch to a non-secure log-in for my
> e-mail.  (I don't want to change to Ubuntu 14.04 or 14.10 at the moment,
> for reasons which are too boring to explain!)

I hear you. I've had one email provider that Thunderbird just wouldn't
connect to and then the last straw was when it started randomly closing
itself. I can tell you Sylpheed 3.2.0 can at least access FastMail,
although I haven't tried sending. However, it is a very basic mail client,
and I still had to log into webmail when I received an email with large
attachments (5MB) as Sylpheed kept closing itself when I tried to read
that mail.