Re: [Evolution] IMAP server dead, but evolution has my emails

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Thu, 2014-10-30 at 17:39 -0500, Greg Oliver wrote:
> My mail server did some nasty things the other night, and I was 
> forced to rebuild without a backup to restore.  Most users were ok 
> since they had cached copies of their emails, and could copy them to 
> local folders, and the re-create the server in their client and copy 
> them to the server's folders.
>
> I have a predicament where all of my mail is still in 
> ~/.cache/evolution/mail....., but evolution will not let me copy the 
> messages to local folders from the GUI since the IMAP server is 
> offline (I am doing all of this unconnected, and not accepting the 
> new cert for the new machine), so I cannot easily move them back and 
> forth.

        Hi,
while running evolution on a disconnected machine might work the same, 
try to run evolution from a terminal like this:
   $ evolution --offline
That will start evolution in offline mode, thus showing you only 
offline data. I do not know your evolution version, but I suppose 
it'll work too, especially if it's something like 3.12.4+ [1].

Otherwise create a Maildir account, pointing to some local directory. 
Create a folder in it in the evolution's UI, which will be reflected 
in that local directory. Then copy files from
   ~/.cache/evolution/mail/<imap-account-uid>/folders/...
to the
   <path-to-local-maildir>/.subfolder/new
directory, and then refresh the folder view in the evolution. It'll 
move the messages from the 'new' directory to the 'cur' directory and 
show them as available in the UI. It's laborious, because a need of 
doing it folder by folder, unfortunately. Also delete and expunge the 
*Maildir's* messages from the evolution's UI to not mix folder's 
content.

Definitely make a copy of the ~/.cache/evolution/mail/<imap-account>/
before doing anything with the underlying files, thus you'd not lose 
anything.

        Hope it helps,
        Milan

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=729848