[SOLVED] Evolution migration from mbox to Maildir format

AchilleTalon · Last edited by AchilleTalon on Tue Aug 12, 2014 5:15 pm; edited 1 time in total

I upgraded my system to Gnome 3.12.0 from 2.x.x and evolution now wants to migrate my mbox format files to Maildir, I received the warning message saying to check I have enough space to perform the migration. However, absolutely no information is provided on where the files will be written. Is there temporary directories which will be created somewhere? And what is enough space? I need twice the space required currently by my evolution mailboxes?

It is nice to tell people to watch out, however it is completely useless without further information on where and how many space is needed. I have my stuff on separated filesystems and I really need to know where space will be needed in the filetree to perform the migration.

Anyone can tell?
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VoidMage · Watchman Joined: 14 Oct 2006 Posts: 6196

Well, I don't use evolution and I've migrated my mailbox to maildir years ago (as I've simply seen it as a saner format), but I think I could offer my predictions about the most likely path this migration would take.

As mbox is a single file and maildir stores each mail in a separate file in the appropriate subdir, the size should be roughly the same, though node count will obviously differ.
GUI mail clients tend to create their own dirs to keep the mail in, so so one of most likely locations is the same dir the program puts the rest of your private data, though given a large step in versions, in this case a major move might have been done, in example if the program didn't use xdg dirs earlier, it might now.
Anyway, the mails will land (most likely) somewhere in your homedir.

The details of the conversion are specific to evolution - there's no telling if any temporary files will be used at all.

AchilleTalon · Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2014 7:46 pm Post subject:

AchilleTalon · Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2014 4:46 pm Post subject:

I migrated to the new data format, twice the size of the old data space is required in the same directory $HOME/.local/share/evolution.

My problem now is after migration the old data has not been deleted, neither temporary data. I did removed the mbox account created by the migration process, however the data is still there.

What is the procedure to identify and remove this no longer needed data and recover space in the filesystem?

Note: Nevermind, I got it. In $HOME/.local/share/evolution/mail there is a subdirectory which contains old files and which was associated with the temporary mbox account created, I just deleted the entire content and directory. Deleting the account doesn't delete the directory content.

I still wonder why this process isn't simply documented anywhere.
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