Update: since reportbug 7.7.0 and Debian bullseye, it is now possible to specific your Mail User Agent (MUA) adding the proper option in the ~/.reportbugrc file. For example:

$ cat ~/.reportbugrc
[...]
mua xdg-email

If you don’t have the xdg-email tool from the xdg-utils package installed, you can directly specify the MUA application, like in mua evolution.

This is mostly a note pad for myself with quick instructions about how to create a bug report for Debian and edit it and send it with Evolution.

reportbug is Debian’s tool for sending bug reports. Although it is a nice tool that automatizes most of this process, it only supports some email clients for the final steps of editing the message (and send it). Among these programs is not Evolution, my preferred mail application.

Fortunately, there is a way to work around this problem. The way of doing it is by placing the mbox file created by reportbug into Evolution’s local Drafts folder. As we can read on its manual, Evolution stores the user’s data files at $HOME/.local/share/evolution.

By doing a simple check around that path, we can conclude the following solution: first, we generate the bug report and place the output in the proper location, as in this command:

$ reportbug -o ~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local/.Drafts/new/reportbug-mail.mbox

After finishing walking through reportbug‘s wizard, the only action left is launching Evolution and opening a new email that has appeared in the local Drafts folder, finish editing it (attaching files, etc.) and send it.