For *me* it's not a big deal, except for when I initially set up a new reader and want to add 400+ books to shelves. After that, such as now, I rarely add more than 16 books at a time, generally of the same genre, so I just use the "Manage shelf" option and populate them that way.
When I went through the sticky (*after* attempting to create shelves through Calibre), I read there are some changes that need to be made to the plugins to allow metadata to be transferred over - I didn't do any of that when I tried Calibre the first time. That could be why I saw a shelf, but no books on the shelf.
Re: Spam: Gmail if often quick to flag something normally sent to my inbox as spam if there is a keyword they think is "spam specific". I have found receipts, facebook status update notifications, and Amazon emails in my server-based Gmail UI (I use Thunderbird as a laptop client). WHY they are put in there is beyond me, but there they are.
Re: powered off book covers: I tested it with several of both ereader storaged ebooks and micro sd carded ebooks (I'm just making up words now). When I powered off with a Kobo stored ebook (book in the reader memory), the cover shows up perfectly fine. When I power off on a book that is stored on the micro sd card, the generic cover shows up. It's like it doesn't have enough time to render the cover from the sd card before the power goes off. I pretty much NEVER power off my reader, so it's not a big deal. It's just a quirk, another quirk that makes this so fascinating/frustrating to play with.
