Re: [Evolution] Recover messages from Evolution client to new email server

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Tue, 2019-09-03 at 11:44 -0700, Bret Stern wrote:
> Not sure what you mean by copy.

        Hi,
by "make copies of the data" I meant to backup somewhere at least
~/.cache/evolution/mail/, thus if anything breaks you've the old
messages there.

> In the past when switching email providers, I've setup two accounts
> in Evolution (the new and the old), then dragged my emails from the
> old to the new.

Right, that's what I'd do too.

> Also, I see there are two "f5a0f2a2fbbba8b4b320600c768089b9f62e69d5"
> strings which I suspect are Evolutions id for each email account.

Correct, those are ID-s.

> I tried copying and pasting all the "1a,0c, 2e" hex abbreviated
> folders in the cur folder for the old account into the new account.
> Thought they may show up, but no luck.

Yeah, it doesn't work that way. Even if they would show up, it will be
just about the local data, not the server content.

> So what's going to happen to my old account data, if I allow it to
> connect to the new email server...will I lose my cached eamils when
> the inbox is refreshed/synced?

Right, once you let the old account connect to the new server it'll get
the new folder hierarchy with its folder content and it'll sync them,
thus it'll remove the messages which are not part of the server from
the local cache.

What you did sounds perfectly fine, I'd do it the same. I'd also change
the host name of the old account to avoid refresh of the old account's
local cache. With the new account configured, I'd either copy whole
subfolder (by right-clicking it in the folder tree and picking "Copy
Folder To..." option), or select the folder and in the message list
select all messages (Ctrl+A), then Message->Copy To Folder, and pick
the new account as the destination in both cases.

The only downside, and one thing I'm not sure about, is that the copy
can stop on the first message not being stored in the local cache, with
an error like "Message not available in offline mode", or some similar
about offline. That would make it pretty hard to copy the messages in
the Evolution itself.

To be able to import only what is stored on the disk in the IMAP cache
(luckily IMAPx stores messages in single files, though it has its
downside too), you can go to the respective folders, like to that you
named:

   $ cd /home/bret/.cache/evolution/mail/f5a0f2a2fbbba8b4b320600c768089b9f62e69d5/folders/INBOX/cur

and run this lengthy command there:

   $ echo -n >/tmp/fake.mbox; for fl in `find . -name '*' -type f`; do \
     echo "From user@no.where" >>/tmp/fake.mbox; \
     cat $fl >>/tmp/fake.mbox; done

This will concatenate all the cached messages into a single .mbox file,
named /tmp/fake.mbox, which can be imported in Evolution using File->
Import->Single file->....

There are surely better tools to concatenate messages into an .mbox
file. It can be also cumbersome to import folders one by one,
especially if you've many of them. I do not have anything better for
it.

Hope it helps.
        Bye,
        Milan