Re: [Evolution] local mail box garbage collection

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Sun, 2016-04-17 at 11:55 +0200, Ernest Sales wrote:
> Running Evolution 3.12.9 on debian jessie+bpo.
>
> For a long time now I was wondering if Evoltion local mail box got a
> proper garbage collection. I suppose this is not a concern for users
> taking advantage of IMAP servers, but I happen to keep a local record
> of most important mails, and not a small one in spite of removing
> attachments etc.
>
> Yesterday I had a dissapointing confirmattion of my fears. While
> troubleshooting a friend's email account, several hundreds of mails
> landed on my inbox, many of them with big attachments. All these were
> duly trashed, and the trash was expunged. Nevertheless, the size of
> my
> next Evolution backup increased by 90 MB.
>
> Does this happen only to me --and if so, why?
>
> Is this a known issue, or should I report a bug?
>
> Does anyone know a more or less artisanal fix?

AFAIK there is no "garbage collection" of mail, just of the SQL index
files.

How is the local mail stored? It could be the (old) mbox style, where
every folder is a single file, or the newer Maildir format where each
folder has a directory and each message is a file. In the mbox case
deleted messages are not removed until after an expunge (which I see
you did), at which time the entire file is read to copy non-deleted
messages to a new file, which is then renamed.

I'm just speculating, but all this means a lot of file activity. If
your backup procedure is incremental this could mean that the first
backup after the cleanup operation creates a lot of new data.

poc