Cannot use a SOCKS proxy with Epiphany, Empathy, Evolution

Oh yes, I forgot to mention: this used to work fine in Ubuntu 8.10 with Epiphany, Pidgin, etc. Evolution didn't take the proxy into account, but that was probably because of https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=555888

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

Yes, it is consistently reproducible. To do this:

1. have a machine that will be used as the SSH host in which you will tunnel into
2. SSH into it, by running this in a terminal: ssh -v -N -D 8000 the-remote-host, keep the terminal open
3. go in gnome's proxy settings (gnome-network-properties)
4. set the mode to "manual proxy configuration"
5. set the "socks host" to localhost, port 8000 (leave the other proxy types blank)
6. make the terminal (the one with the ssh tunnel running in it) show "always on top" so you can see its activity at all times
7. use epiphany, evolution, empathy, to visit websites or connect to accounts. Notice that nothing happens in the terminal.
8. use chromium-browser, firefox, pidgin to do the same: notice that activity shows up in the terminal where SSH is running (new "channels" are opened, etc.), indicating that those apps indeed use the socks proxy

So actually it's not that the gnome proxy is broken, but that evolution, empathy and epiphany (which used to work) don't support it.

Since this is app specific and not the control center's fault, I filed a couple of bugs upstream to reduce your workload:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=601894 for empathy
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=601895 for epiphany
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=601898 for evolution (there must be a ton of proxy bugs, but I'm getting seriously lost among all the tricky variants of evolution proxy bugs)

I can confirm this bug on karmic.

I have this problem too, specifically with emphaty

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. A new version of GNOME Control Center is available on Maverick and we are wondering if this bug is still an issue for you with that version? Could you please test and comment back? Thanks in advance.

Yes, it's still the case. Evolution 2.32 *might* have a fix, but it isn't packaged in maverick and, as such, I haven't been able to test that particular version yet.

The dialog has been deprecated and rewritten in GNOME3 and Oneiric, closing the bug