Re: [Evolution] won't expunge/empty trash

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Wed, 2010-06-30 at 10:56 -0400, Carpet Nailz wrote:
> I removed the two files from .evolution
> ( "~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.ev-summary" and
> "~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.ibex.index"). Evolution restarted almost
> immediately (that is, there didn't seem to be any lag due to recreating
> indexes).
>
> After the "hard" shutdown and restart, moving mail to different folders
> seems to be working ok.
>
> But the same problem continues with expunging deleted mail. It doesn't
> seem to make any difference whether I use File->Empty Trash of Folder
> ->Expunge. I keep getting the same "Error while expunging folder"
> message.

[Please don't top-post on this list]

The only difference between the two methods is that File->Empty Trash
works on the entire account and Folder->Expunge only on the current
folder. Note that if you have several accounts you need to Empty Trash
on each of them separately.

> The entire .Evolution folder is only 890MB with the Mail folder being
> 860MB.  

So it's not a file size limitation issue.

> /tmp is only 53 MB. (In any case, that should empty out each time I
> reboot, shouldn't it?)

That depends on your OS.

> Where would I see whether there's a max size set
> for the /tmp file?

There is no /tmp file. On some systems /tmp occupies its own filesystem
(which in some cases is actually a RAM disk) which would limit the size.
Otherwise there's no express limit on the size of /tmp other than the
amount of free space on the filesystem.

> The file system holding /home (/dev/sda3) is only 23% full.

The important datum is how much actual space is free, i.e. 23% of how
much, and 23MB in /tmp out of how much? The way to find out is:

df -h /tmp /home

However if we assume that you do in fact have enough space, the most
likely explanation is a corrupt database. Once again, be sure to
completely shut down Evo before doing this:

rm ~/.evolution/mail/local/folders.db

Note that this will remove some metadata such as labels on messages.

You might also look at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=550414
which is referenced on the FAQ page I mentioned earlier. According to
the last few comments there (it's a very long thread dating back several
years) the problem seems to have been fixed in the latest version of
Evo. Since you didn't mention what version you have, your best solution
might simply be to update.

As a last resort, there could be an actual corruption in one of the mbox
files. That's messier to deal with, but you might take a look at the
formail command (part of the procmail package) which can rewrite mboxes
to fix some problems of this sort.

poc