Re: [Evolution] IMAP mail location pointing to the evolution folder

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

I see this week's discussion about top posting has been thoroughly read
and acted on ...

On Sun, 2013-08-04 at 09:38 +0800, AlR wrote:
> But my evolution was setup first and it's been there for a long time.
> So that means all my emails are in 'evolution' format. If I where to
> turn it around I would have to convert my emails to whatever mail
> format my IMAP would have.

You just need to copy them within Evolution from one mail store to
another.

> Why do you think that it would be inviting trouble? 

Because Evolution expects the files in its private store under .local to
be private and unmolested by anything else.  It may be OK, but it won't
be a scenario that has been tested by the developers and the action of
Evolution under such conditions will be unpredictable; it's also
possible that the behaviour of your imap server will be less than
optimal when confronted with its mailstore possibly being altered in
strange ways by something else.

Evolution was not designed to share access to its private mailstore, so
it is something that would not be recommended.

> And as far as I know IMAP,  or dovecot in particular, will not touch
> the files unless you send emails or delete emails.

That's not true.  There's lots of flags and timestamps and so on that
are changed merely by reading an email - if you read a previously unread
email, the Maildir standard requires that the filename of the message is
changed to reflect that status - reading an email makes the same changes
to a message file as deleting it (i.e. setting a flag in the filename).

Ultimately, you can, of course, do anything you want with your system -
but don't be surprised if Evolution becomes more unstable and that any
future updates completely trash everything.

P.