Re: [Evolution] What happened to Evolution?

[Adam Tauno Williams <awilliam whitemice org>]

On Tue, 2010-12-21 at 15:27 -0500, Darren Govoni wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-12-21 at 15:19 -0500, Adam Tauno Williams wrote: 
> > On Tue, 2010-12-21 at 21:04 +0100, Jean-Michel Pourà wrote:
> > > Le lundi 20 dÃcembre 2010 Ã 09:14 -0500, Darren Govoni a Ãcrit :
> > > > 1) I now get frequent "error storing folders", "error generating
> > > > message list"
> > > > 2) It's so slow. It is always "Storing folder", taking almost minutes
> > > > to complete. Its on average 5-8x slower
> > > > downloading, storing and viewing messages.
> > > > 3) Its very buggy. When new messages arrive, they no longer show up in
> > > > the folder I'm viewing.
> > > > I have to click another folder and click back to see them.
> > > > 4) For the first time ever, it corrupted my email files and I had to
> > > > recover from backup. 
> > > I had these issues until I understood that the deleted messages are not
> > > deleted. They are simply hidden. Thus the mailboxes become huge and
> > > unusable. There is no automatic purge of deleted messages. This is a
> > > flaw in the design of Evolution.
> > That would make no sense for a local desktop application - to have to
> > have a database instance to store [cache] mail?
> There are numerous embeddable SQL transactional databases that provide
> fast, reliable
> and ACID properties that would greatly improve the speed and
> durability of something
> important like email. 
> Since its now clear that Evolution has scaling issues, 

I disagree.

> moving in this design direction should be a good thing.

Have you tried them with large amounts of data, with BLOBs [which is
essentially what an e-mail message is]?  In my experience they fall
down, *hard*.  The meta-data databases in current versions uses SQLite
[I believe];  the actual messages are stored in the filesystem [1]
(which seems reasonable to me).  I'd agree that anytime the meta-data
database gets whacked it is a bug.

[1] I don't recall how; if they are mbox [which might have a 2GB issue]
or if they [the developers] switched to maildir or mh or something else.