[Evolution] How to Archive Email?

[Jeff Nelson <jnmnus yahoo com>]

Environment: evo 2.26.1 on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)

Email storage:
1. imap work account with no folders other than INBOX
2. maildir account with a hierarchy of folders (675 total). Email gets 
moved from imap/INBOX to maildir/FOLDER for storage & archiving.

I have years worth of email, going all the way back to 2002. The 
single-maildir hierarchy is starting to suffer under the weight of 
32,000 message files stored in 675 separate folders. At startup, 
evolution chews up a lot of CPU time and disk I/Os rebuilding the search 
folders I have created; it takes a long time to shutdown because 
evolution is "checking folder for consistency". (This seems to be 
working better now but I still want to proceed.)

What I'd like to do now is archive the email in a new set of maildir 
folders so I can back it up and then remove it. My thought was to:

1. create a new email account using maildir storage (one for each year 
from 2002 to 2008); these are the archive accounts
2. create a search folder (one for each year) containing messages sent 
or received in that year
3. select the messages from the search folder and move them to the 
appropriate archive/INBOX folder.

I am stuck on step 3. Selecting the messages works, but evolution won't 
move them. I suspect it has to do with the fact that the search folders 
are virtual, spanning all the maildir accounts.

Is there any way for me to find and archive messages by year from one 
maildir-based account to another, without having to go through each of 
the 675 folders?

Thanks.

-Jeff