Comment 7 for bug 387833

I would also love to see Evolution able to do something like this, but it's not exactly an easy thing to do. Implementing this would mean that the mail checking system from Evolution needs to be pulled out of the UI (probably the entire mail account management system) and daemonized. The daemon would have to be able to run in your session (similar to how evolution-data-server does now) and regularly check your mail sources for new messages.

Evolution would have to re-think their association between accounts and various account-specific settings. Some of the things that are currently account-specific might have to become account-neutral in order for Evolution to properly integrate with this new daemon.

A dbus interface would be required for the mail checking service to notify various UIs (Evolution, indicator-applet, maybe even tinymail eventually?) of checking-mail and new-mail events. The service also needs to be able to handle check-account and check-all-accounts requests. Probably various other things too.

This is not even close to how Evolution is currently designed afaik. I'd love to see a bug filed upstream for this. It's a major app rewrite (what I propose is anyway). But wouldn't it be nice if mail clients other than Evolution could share account information and read messages from the same service and local datastore?