Ever since I've installed the latest Ubuntu (9.04) my Wireless connection sometimes drops. It's annoying, but it's a story for a later time. Suffice to say it comes back up automatically after a couple of seconds, and usually my connections just keep going for the most part.
Anyway, this one day I was doing some work, and I was expecting an important email. So I switch over to Evolution in order to retrieve it. I hit F9… nothing. "What the…? Whatever, I'll just click the Send/Receive button."
Evolution Send/Recieve disabled
To my surprise, the Send/Receive button was disabled. Initially I thought it was because I had some modal dialog box open or something. No such luck. "Maybe", I thought "the send/receive operation failed somehow and now hangs". So I closed Evolution and restarted it. Same thing: Send/Receive button still disabled. This was getting annoying; I really needed that email. I tried closing Evolution again and this time checked the process list to see if Evolution was leaving behind some child process for the Send/Receive function. Nothing.
"Fuck it, I'll reboot my machine, I don't have time for this". Man, I gotta tell ya, it felt like the good old windows days all over again! Rebooting to fix a problem — pathetic. The machine comes back up, I start Evolution, and STILL the button is disabled!
Finally I give up trying to figure it out on my own, and decide to Google for the answer: Google: evolution+send+receive+greyed+out. It even turned up as a "Google Suggests" suggestion in the drop-down.
Results 1 - 10 of about 115,000 for evolution send receive greyed out.
Hundred and fifteen-thousand results. Guess I'm not the only one having this problem.
Can you guess what the problem was? Here's a little hint:
What a useful feature!
Really Evolution? Really?? I'm working in Offline mode?!
Here's a tip. If you're gonna add a useless feature to your software that does absolutely NOTHING (and it really does nothing) other than annoy users, at least:
- make sure you show the user a message that (s)he's now working in offline mode.
- tell the user what the consequences of working offline are.
- test it before shipping it (My wireless connection had already come back online hours before).
- kill yourself.
Offline mode has to be, without a doubt, the most useless annoying feature I've ever seen in a program. There is no need for it at all. It does nothing, except for annoying me.
Update: Cris spotted something in the File menu in the picture above: the 'Download Messages for Offline Usage' isn't greyed out. How am I gonna download a message for offline usage if I'm not even online? Plus, all these messages are already offline, since I've only got Local storage mail accounts (I retrieve my email with fetchmail, after which I have to hit the Send/Receive to fetch the mail from /var/spool/mail/fboender). Consistancy motherfucker, do you speak it?
