Re: [Evolution] bug during transition from V2 to V3

[Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve>]

On Mon, 2014-04-14 at 13:06 +0200, Anglade Pierre-Matthieu wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Thank you for your answer. Here are more in formations corresponding to
> your questions. Please, do not hesitate to ask many more. I'm very grateful
> for any kind of help and then very willing to fully collaborate.
>
> Process running ?
> * To be able to use my computer, I have to SIGSTOP the process every
> morning and then SIGCONT it every evening. So far, it is running since one
> week. Now that the memory use has increased to it's maximum, it is seldom
> able to use more than 1% of the cpu (because it is always wanting datas
> stored in the swap). Before, getting to ~8GB it was persistently using
> ~100% of cpu. It is clear that the process is running. What is unclear for
> me — and the real purpose of my question — is whether it is really working
> efficiently or it has just fallen into some kind of infinite loop.

That's why I suggested you use strace to see what it's doing. "strace -p
<evo-process-id>" will show all the system calls it's making. If for
example it's constantly polling or waiting for some event after all this
time then it's probably not going to finish.

> Size of the mailstore
> * I'm not sure of the mailstore location. Here is what I currently have on
> disk :
> $ du -ms .local/share/evolution/mail/ .config/evolution/mail/
> 3500    .local/share/evolution/mail/
> 2       .config/evolution/mail/

That's not very big so it doesn't look like the source of the problem. I
would say the process has almost certainly hung (functionally if not
literally) and it might be time to just kill it.

> Kind of accounts
> * Previously I was using a pop3 account. And I'm keeping all the associated
> old emails. Now, I'm currently using an imap account. YET… for as much as
> I've been able to guess, evolution IS still storing some of my emails on
> disks : when I sort them out in some kind of "local folders". (I must
> apologize, but I'm not able to use technically accurate wording about
> emails : I'm definitely not an expert regarding these technologies).

What it's storing on disk is 1) index information, 2) message headers,
3) any messages you have explicitly saved locally or copied to a local
folder. 1 and 2 are both expendable, i.e. if you throw them away Evo
will just recreate them next time it connects.

> On Mon, Apr 14, 2014 at 11:40 AM, Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve> wrote:
>
> > On Mon, 2014-04-14 at 09:40 +0200, Anglade Pierre-Matthieu wrote:
> >
> > > - Is there anything I can do to help evolution perform his format
> > > transition ?
> >
> > Again, hard to say without more information. For example, if your
> > accounts are IMAP it's relatively easy to transition them as all the
> > mail is on the server. If they're POP then all the local mail files have
> > to be converted from mbox to maildir format. In the latter case there
> > are ways to do the conversion offline, i.e. stopping Evo completely and
> > using conversion tools from the Shell.
>
>
> * I'm definitely interested in knowing more about the way to work this out
> offline if it exist. Especially by shell commands. It's usually so much
> more easy to understand.

I'm not talking about some specific Evo tool, but there are Shell or
Perl tools around for converting mbox to maildir, if you look for them.

> But you wording makes me fear the mix of pop and
> imap is not a very favorable configuration (I was very surprised that
> evolution was asking my password during its conversion process ; so I guess
> it does require some kind of connection).

You can certainly have both POP and IMAP accounts with no problem. What
would be inadvisable is to have both POP and IMAP connections to the
same account. That's liable to lead to confusion.

> > Alternatively, you can set up a
> > new Evo instance and then import the old mailboxes, which will convert
> > them on the fly. You would also have to save your address books and
> > re-import them, which depends on how they are set up.
>
> * I guess I don't understand what you mean by a new Evo instance. Would you
> mind elaborate on this please ?

I meant to save your current mboxes to a different folder and set up
your accounts again. You can then import old email from the saved mbox
files.

Alternatively, if your old Evo version still works, you can save all
your mail (including mail from POP accounts) on an IMAP server, install
the updated Evo and connect to the server to get your mail back.

Contact information would depend on how you have it set up, e.g. if it's
on an LDAP server then you just point the new Evo setup at the same
server. Similarly for Gmail contacts or other online services. If you
have local contact data it might be best to save it in vcard format (or
upload it to one of the online services).

To be clear: everything is easier if you use online services, especially
IMAP rather than POP. The only reason to keep using POP is if your email
provider doesn't support IMAP. If that's the case I would consider
changing providers where possible.

poc