Re: [Evolution] Inbox too large

[anders70 <anders-9 stengaard net>]

Apparantly, Evolution does not actually remove messages from the inbox file,
when asked to move messages to another folder. I just realized that my inbox
file contains messages from many years back, even though i (try to) embty my
inbox every summer and christmas break. Hence, I also just ran into the 2 GB
limit.

I developed the following workaround:

Ask evolution to create a new folder, called e.g. "Rescue"
Evolution will (among other things) create an empty file:
.evolution/mail/local/Rescue (which will be empty)
Quit Evolution

copy a suitable chunk of the end of the Inbox file to the file Rescue,
making sure that the first line copied will be the start of an email. that
is, the first line copied should be a: "From ..." field.

I used the shell command: "tail -n xxx Inbox > Rescue" to achieve this. The
trick is to find the right value for xxx (which is the number of lines from
the end of Inbox, that will be copied). xxx must be chosen so that the first
line copied is the beginning of the oldest e-mail you want to rescue from
the Inbox.
I started by guessing a number for xxx (e.g. 4,000,000) Then I looked at the
result with "less Resuce". I then searched for the first instance of "Jul
2009" as i wanted to rescue mails as old as this. Then I seached for the
first following instance of "From", which gave me the beginning of a mail
receiven in July 2009. I noted the line number: yyy, and computed a new
value for xxx, as xxx= 4,000,000 - yyy +1. Running "tail -n xxx Inbox >
Rescue" again, then copied all my messages, starting from the chosen one, to
the Rescue file.

Rename Inbox to e.g. Inbox_old (in case you need to rescue more)

Start evolution

Go to the Rescue folder

Evolution will complain, but copy the messages in the Rescue mailbox into
it's internal format, making the rescued mails accessible once again.

Evolution will also create a new (empty) Inbox ... as there is no longer a
file called Inbox

Move all the messages from Rescue to the new Inbox if you like.

And you should be back in business. - it worked for me

Good luck. 


markybob wrote:
> Evolution has stopped being able to receive new emails.  When I try to
> fetch new mail (pop3), I receive this error message:
> "Error while Feching Mail.  Cannot append message to mbox file:
> /home/markybob/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox: File too large"
>
> ls -lh on the file shows that it is 2.0G in size.  What can I do short
> of deleting emails?
>
> Thanks!
> _______________________________________________
> Evolution-list mailing list
> Evolution-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/evolution-list

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