What's the current consensus on running Evolution in the background?
iOS, Android and many Linux desktop environments have a default functionality of displaying new mail notifications even if the mail app is closed. That is not the case with Evolution. As a person who often has to immediately respond to email messages, I really lack this feature.
Are there any plans to implement it? I know that background apps have been labeled as "bad from a usability standpoint" by some people in GNOME community but even the official guidelines do not discourage them, to quote https://wiki.gnome.org/Initiatives/StatusIconMigration/Guidelines:
In some cases it is appropriate for an application to continue to run after all its windows have been closed. This can include chat and messaging applications, reader applications that alert users about new content, or scheduling or organisation apps that show reminders. Status icons have traditionally been used for this purpose. However, they are not necessary.
Applications that want to continue to run after their windows have been closed should simply continue to run. However, they should only do so if they genuinely run in the background and don't have a noticeable impact on the user's experience. Applications that use a noticeable amount of system resources shouldn't run in the background.
Notifications should be the only way that an application interacts with the user while it runs in the background: the application shouldn't show anything else on screen, and no audio should be played, including notification sounds or audio playback (running in the background isn't recommended for music player applications for this reason).
Chat applications might want to ask the user to confirm whether they should run in the background when their final window is closed. This clarifies that the user won't be logged out of the chat service.
Currently, there's an optional broken evolution-on plugin which seems to have been abandoned for the last 5 or so years. Would it make sense to include it and maintain it in the official repo of Evolution?