Exchange meeting invites don't work anymore in Hardy

[Paul Smith]

Binary package hint: evolution-exchange

Up until the very latest Hardy package updates (on Tuesday, 6 May or so) my Evolution integration was working OK. I would sometimes get the Exchange backend dying on me and would have to restart Evo (maybe once or twice a day). But it was livable (sad that this is what we consider "livable" but...)

However, since the latest update my problems have gotten much worse. Not only does the exchange backend die much more often, but even worse (and what this bug is about) none of the meeting invitations I'm getting are showing up properly in my inbox.

As you may know Exchange meeting invites show up as a multipart MIME message with a text part containing some simple meeting details, and then also a text/calendar attachment containing a VCALENDAR request. Evo used to recognize this and pop up a nice display to show the meeting info and buttons to allow me to accept/reject/etc.

However, now all my meeting invites are displayed as just the plain text of the message, and there's not even an attachment button shown for the message that I can use to save the ICS file and import it. It's as if Evo doesn't recognize that the attachment exists at all.

If I use C-u to see the message source I can plainly see the VCALENDAR attachment there. Also if I visit my Exchange inbox via my browser I can see meetings there properly.

This is a very serious bug that really reduces the usefulness of Evo for me.

[Paul Smith (psmith-gnu)]

I filed this bug with Gnome bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=532384

There, one of the Evo developers suggested I use the Edit -> Plugins menu item and find the "Prefer plain-text" plugin, and disable it.

I did that, and now my invites show up properly and seem to work as expected. That is good.

However, this should absolutely not be necessary! First, that plugin is labeled as highly experimental: "This plugin is unsupported demonstration code only". Second, it's very unlikely that most users of Evolution will WANT this plugin, even if it didn't break meeting invites: most people will want to see the HTML version of email and not prefer the plain-text version.

So, this plugin should be disabled by default when Evo installs, but it isn't. That's still a bug.

The workaround, though, is to disable the plugin by hand and then your invites will work again.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported, but feel free to report any other bugs you find.