Comment 36 for bug 175233

The behavior Steven Willis described happens to me on 32 bit Jaunty, fully updated. The preview pane is turned on. The hang on "formatting message" happens on an IMAP account every time I try to load a message with external images where the sender is in my address book. I had Evolution set to load external images for addresses stored in my address book. Turning off the preview pane doesn't make "formatting message" go away after it hangs.

If I kill the evolution-data-server the problem goes away until I try to load a message with external graphics. If I turn off the preview pane & open the same message after restarting evolution-data-server, the "formatting message" notification doesn't hang. The external graphics are still not loaded automatically as expected. I have to go to View - Load Images to get the images to load.

The hang seems to only be caused for me when the preview pane is open and Evolution is set to "Load images in messages from Contacts". It doesn't hang if I set it to always load images from the Internet, with or without preview pane. It doesn't hang if I manually load images while the preview pane is open.
To prevent the hang, I set Evolution to "Never Load Images from the Internet"
(Preferences - Mail Preferences - HTML Mail). I see this didn't prevent the hang for others.

2.6.28-15-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Tue Aug 18 18:40:08 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

hstxc0@lpadc72dmj1:~$ apt-cache policy evolution
evolution:
  Installed: 2.26.1-0ubuntu2
  Candidate: 2.26.1-0ubuntu2
  Version table:
 *** 2.26.1-0ubuntu2 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty-updates/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 9.04
Release: 9.04
Codename: jaunty