Re: [Evolution] Migrating from Thunderbird via import without duplicates

[Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk>]

> Then what exactly is the use case for importing from Thunderbird as per 
> [the 
> manual](https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/import-apps-mozilla.html.en)? 

That is surely for importing to local folders, not IMAP folders 

> As I have between 50 - 100 GB of mail to sync, with it all backed up 
> locally, I'm happy to try to break things in an effort to avoid days if 
> not weeks of re-syncing. Are there details on this process (warnings 
> heeded) anywhere?

A serious question: if you are using IMAP, why do you need to "sync"
all your mail?  Evolution keeps a copy of any mail you read as a local
cache, there's no permanent store of the mail, it's not a duplicate of
your IMAP account.

> I have access to both the mail server and local machine for all but my 
> gmail accounts. I'll test the process on less important demo accounts as 
> well.

If you need a local store of *all* your mail, then you might like to
look at something like Offline IMAP - this will drag down all your mail
and keep it locally, then you point Evolution at that store rather than
the actual IMAP account.  You may be better looking at that to pre-
populate with your extant local copy.

> I guess I could copy my local backups to the evolution maildir, ssh into 
> my mail server and rsync the maildirs. I'd hope it'd recognize there to 
> be no need to resync and duplicate everything at that point, but maybe 
> others have tried this with failure?

The good thing about standards is that there's so many to choose from.

I would strongly advise that you don't go fiddling around with the
internal Evolution data stores. Yes, it is Maildir, but the encoding of
the filenames and flags may not be consistent with what Evolution
thinks it wants.

Besides, the Maildir store is only for local accounts - the cache of
remote/IMAP accounts is not Maildir and is certainly not meant to be an
archival copy of the mail.

P.