On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 10:21 PM Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, 2025-03-20 at 09:11 +1100, Stephen Morris wrote:
Does Evolution support the tagging of outgoing mails as"organisation-sensitive" and hence generate the appropriate mail headers, and conversely, when an email comes in with mail headers specifying a sensitivity level does Evolution tag the mail appropriately?
I don't actually know what you mean by organisation-sensitive or sensitivity level, I can only guess.
https://www.google.com/search?q=data+classification+and+sensitivity+levels.
(I would have sent it privately, but emails to your email address bounced).
Filters can be set that will read headers in incoming mail that can set labels, assign colours, assign/adjust scores.
But I found out, long ago, that when it comes to labelling messages it just sets something *like* label1, label2, label3, and you have to assign meanings to those labels on the client (work, home, later). And they only mean something to it on *that* client. If a label1 message is read on another client that set up their labels in another order, it gets whatever they set up on their label1. About the only well supported flag I know of in email is the "important" or prioritise flag.
With various email clients, these labels or flags are not put into the message body (nowhere that I can see), they're in the metadata that the client keeps in its own index or added to the filename the email is stored as when using maildir (likewise with some mail servers).
In the past I'd received emails from a government source which came with a "classification" level somewhere, but it's not something you see in everyday mail, so whether there's a standard for it, or they just bung text in the subject line, I do not know.
Looking through my archives, I see they shoved [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] onto the end of the subject line, and had these headers:
x-protective-marking: VER=2012.3, NS=gov.au, SEC=UNCLASSIFIED, ORIGIN=their-email-address-was-here x-original-protective-marking: VER=2012.3, NS=gov.au, SEC=UNCLASSIFIED, ORIGIN=my-email-address-was-here x-classifier: janusSEAL for Outlook 2.6.2
The x- prefix indicates something non-standard, and I suspect only means something to their internal mail system. Evolution can be set to show headers of your choice in the mail reading window pain, but you're not going to see an interpreted result, just all that raw text after the header.
I think they'd have at least three ways of doing that: Custom mail software, custom plug-in for the mail software, processing by the mail server before sending.
Email signatures can be used to add boilerplate notices, but for organisations that *require* such things and don't want it it left up to an email author to use their email program properly, it's often done by their mailserver as they process outgoing mail.
I suppose you could set up a few different signatures on the client, that the mail server would react to and set other headers appropriately. That's work with almost any email client that lets you pick a specific signature when you write a message.
There are various add-ons to emails that are custom and rely on specific software, or so rare that hardly anything implements them. (again, relying on using specific software). And it's relying that any replies to such special messages keep special headers in their replies, which they probably won't.
Does Evolution, when using IMAP, provide the functionality to leavethe mails on the server or mirror them locally if desired?
Yes, Evolution does what IMAP is intended to do and leave emails on the server. And it can do local caching.
Does Evolution, when setting up the mail interface, provide thefunctionality to auto configure the mail server definitions or do you have to set them up manually?
There is a feature where it pulls configuration data from a well-known address on a server (*). Some (other) mail clients seem to do this not by querying the domain of the mail server you're wanting to use, but some global database which obviously only works for services listed with that database.
If your mail server was example.com and you started to set up an account on Evolution for johndoe@example.com it'd try: http://autoconfig.example.com/mail/config-v1.1.xml to fill in all the other technical details for the user. Which, according to the specs, could simply be general mail server stuff, or can have user-specific details.
At least that address works when I set up my mail system, I don't know if there's other variations on the well-known address.
Jeff