Re: [Evolution] Ways to reduce IMAP caching?

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> Looking at the textfiles in the cache, it features the full messages
> including the attachments (within the text). So there seems to be a
> mismatch between the supposed behavior of only downloading headers and
> the actual status of having downloaded all messages.

Evolution will cache any message bodies that it downloads in the course
of its normal operation - trust me, that speeds things up quite
considerably.  If you enable "Automatically sync remote mail locally"
then it will download everything even if you've never actually looked at
the message.  Or at least that's how I understand it works.

> I did do a 'Remove Duplicate Messages' action on the full Inbox, so
> maybe the messages were downloaded in that regard.

Well, yes, in order to see if a message is duplicated it will need to
look at every message in the folder, and consequently every message body
will be downloaded (and cached).


> Is there a way to safely flush the cache, in order to find out whether
> or not Evolution will fill it back up again?

Yes.  Shutdown evolution completely.  If in doubt use 'evolution
--force-shutdown'.  Then delete ~/.cache/evolution/mail/ - this will
remove all cached mail information, including headers.  The next time
you start up evolution it will download all the headers again, which may
take some time, and obviously every time you go to a new message it will
need to download the body of the message.

As far as I know deleting the cache like this is perfectly safe - after
all, cache is supposed to be only used to help the application, there's
no definitive information stored there.

P.