Re: [Evolution] Need help fixing corrupt folders/indexes?

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 09:43 -0800, Simon Roberts wrote:
> That might be true, but the idea of upgrading while the database is
> corrupt seems perilous indeed...
>
> I really think I need to stabilize the dataset first.

The dataset consists of index files which may already be damaged. As
long as the original mail folder files are intact, there's no problem
deleting them and reindexing. If the mail files themselves are damaged,
you'll almost certainly need to edit them by hand to fix the problem.

> By the way, I notice something else. (And a little more history). I
> had not bothered to expunge my trash, being the paranoid type
> (paranoid about lawyers :) but I got bored of carrying 70,000 old, and
> mostly junk, emails around, so I did so not long ago (after the start
> of the slow behavior, and after the first occurences of strange
> headers, but before this--seemingly unrecoverable--situation.) Now,
> looking at my backup, I notice that the Inbox file (which should
> contain less than 200 emails) is some 1.5GB (yes, gigabytes) in size.
> Not only that, but the mails it contains include a huge proportion of
> deleted, and junk stuff.

If the backup is prior to the expunge, then the file contains all the
old deleted mail.

> So, it appears that somewhere along the line, my trash and my Inbox
> were one. Perhaps this is "normal"? I can conceive of making a
> trashbox simply by flagging a mail as deleted, though I'm obviously
> disappointed if thats the case here as it suggests a possibly
> insurmountable task to separate the two again!

This is a FAQ. Once more with feeling: Evo *does not have a separate
Trash folder*. Trash is a per-account virtual folder that simply indexes
all the messages marked as deleted, wherever they happen to be. The
messages themselves are in their original positions in the various mail
files (for local mail) or server mailstore (for remote ones), but marked
as "deleted".

See
http://www.go-evolution.org/FAQ#I_deleted_a_bunch_of_mail_but_my_mailbox_is_just_as_big_as_before._Why.3F
for example.

poc