------------------------------
Date: Sun, 17 Apr 2016 11:36:56 +0100 From: Patrick O'Callaghan <poc usb ve> To: evolution-list gnome org Subject: Re: [Evolution] local mail box garbage collection Message-ID: <1460889416 2398 13 camel usb ve> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" On Sun, 2016-04-17 at 11:55 +0200, Ernest Sales wrote:Running Evolution 3.12.9 on debian jessie+bpo. For a long time now I was wondering if Evoltion local mail box got a proper garbage collection. I suppose this is not a concern for users taking advantage of IMAP servers, but I happen to keep a local record of most important mails, and not a small one in spite of removing attachments etc. Yesterday I had a dissapointing confirmattion of my fears. While troubleshooting a friend's email account, several hundreds of mails landed on my inbox, many of them with big attachments. All these were duly trashed, and the trash was expunged. Nevertheless, the size of my next Evolution backup increased by 90 MB. Does this happen only to me --and if so, why? Is this a known issue, or should I report a bug? Does anyone know a more or less artisanal fix?AFAIK there is no "garbage collection" of mail, just of the SQL index files. How is the local mail stored? It could be the (old) mbox style, where every folder is a single file, or the newer Maildir format where each
It's in the maildir format.
folder has a directory and each message is a file. In the mbox case deleted messages are not removed until after an expunge (which I see you did), at which time the entire file is read to copy non-deleted messages to a new file, which is then renamed. I'm just speculating, but all this means a lot of file activity. If your backup procedure is incremental this could mean that the first backup after the cleanup operation creates a lot of new data.
Sorry for not making it clear: I'm using the Evolution builtin backup. It's not incremental; AFAICS it takes the ~/.local/share/evolution folder plus the config stuff and compresses all that in a tar.gz file. Very convenient, as this is the format that understands the builtin restore.
poc ------------------------------
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part