This file is a set of notes about how I solved a problem migrating from an older machine running Fedora 10 with Evolution 2.24.5 to Fedora 15 Evolution 3.4.3. My older machine was dying a hardware death and I considered it unable to be updated or changed in any way. My new machine had arrived and I got connected to my ISP server using Evolution 3.4.3. So it went from a simple migration into a merge. I had mail already present that 3.4.3 new about and mail that was valued from the old machine. While the old machine was working I got Evolution 2.24.5 to perform a backup into a local file evolution-backup.tar.gz That file was moved to the new machine using one of those USB flash drives. What follows is a procedure/dialog about how to get various message folders from the backup of the old 2.24.5 data into the area of the new 3.4.3 system. ================================================================ First some symbols I used OLDEVOL=$HOME/mytest/old/.evolution/mail/local NEWEVOL=$HOME/.local/share/evolution/mail/local TMPEVOL=$HOME/mytest/new Place that backup file in your home dir from my flash drive $HOME/evolution-backup.tar.gz So as to reduce vulnerability I did a backup of 3.4.3 and set it aside. Then I worked in a temporary directory called mytest This area would hold both the backup from the old system and converted folders prior to populating the new evolution tree. mkdir $HOME/mytest cd $HOME/mytest mkdir new old I placed the old mailbox system into old cd $HOME/mytest/old tar xvf $HOME/evolution-backup.tar.gz A quick view of the resulting directory was disappointing at first but I realized that the data was really visible at $OLDEVOL Each working folder for our example OURFolder under the old system was visible as four files OURFolder OURFolder.cmeta OURFolder.ibex.index OURFolder.ibex.index.data The actual email messages were found in OURFolder. As this procedure deals with selective restoration of a folder from the old to the new we will use the name OURFolder. This is the name it would have appeared as under Evolution 2.24.5. And ultimately under 3.4.3. We are going to build a temporary copy of the mail messages in our mytest directory tree. $HOME/mytest/new I used a perl script I found on the internet. The file was mb2md-3.20.pl It came from batleth.sapientia-sat.org/projects/mb2md It needs to have a TimeDate Perl library loaded. I installed a package using RPM. Sorry, but I cannot remember where I found it. I found it using google looking for Perl TimeDate The original mail mbx file is located by $OLDEVOL/OURFolder The new directory in our working Evolution 3.4.3 will be located by $NEWEVOL/.OURFolder/cur Note the . before OURFolder The conversion will go from a single file $OLDEVOL/OURFolder to a directory $NEWEVOL/.OURFOLDER/cur that contains files each with a separate email message. We will place the files in a temporary dir $HOME/mytest/new my nomenclature for this is TMPEVOL perl mb2md-3.20.pl -s $OLDEVOL/OURFolder -d $TMPEVOL/OURFolder The script will kick out some complaints but will do all the messages. No here is a find point to examine. The script uses a procedure to convert. I found it worked for my mail from my ISP. There is a option in the script to do the conversion a bit differently. So it may be necessary to read some of the messages and see if they make sense. Not really likely unless one speaks email header gibberish. take a look at $TMPEVOL/OURFolder/cur There will be many files. One per email message encountered by the conversion perl program. If it looks good. Now remember it is the raw message. evolution will change its appearance. NOW THE MOST IMPORTANT PART enter evolution create a new folder OURFolder Shut evolution down. copy the files from our temp directory to the 3.4.3 directory cp $TMPEVOL/OURFolder/cur/* $NEWEVOL/.OURFolder/cur note the . infront of the OURFolder in the destination directory This means you must get used to using the -a option in ls to see these folder/directories as you work with them. NEXT IMPORTANT PART enter evolution select OURFolder (the name we used) sit and wait select inbox select OURFolder the converted mail messages should be there now. Some of this ritual of flipping between OURFolder and inbox may not be necessary but it is how I saw it. This is the time that you get to see if the conversion performed makes real sense. View the messages carefully and if you like it keep them. They are yours. Then you get to repeat the process for each of the folders from the old system you want to restore to the new system. I chose this way as I was going to perform a merge. In some cases I had folders on both old and new that had the same name. So how I chose to handle that is to take OURFolder and make a Old_OURFolder on the new system. Then using Evolution in a normal way I could move mail messages I wanted to keep from the Old_OURFolder to OURFolder and eventually delete the Old_OURFolder. That is the end of the procedure. The key things that I learned here are; 1. the two different versions of Evolution had two different mailbox styles. 2. The two versions of Evolution were not compatible. 3. the evolution of Evolution had abandoned those with older systems. Cynical but apparently true. Backwards compatibility is very important. The useful migration of data is not as simple as constantly updating your mailsystem as each version comes out. Some versions may not offer a real reason to migrate. I for one don't want to become a slave to updates like Windows users are a slave to updates. Rather I look at my Linux environment the same way I looked at HP-UX as a stable working environment that changed when we had to. Not just as HP came out with new versions. When our old machines became HP Obsolete then we were forced to move.