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

[Bo Buckley <topherbuckley gmail com>]

Hi Pete (sorry for the missed reply-all last time),

Thank you for your reply. [And thank you to everyone else for your insight as well!]

>A serious question: if you are using IMAP, why do you need to "sync"
>all your mail? 

Because there is no backup on the server that I can restore from and if I press select all -> delete in Evolution all my mail goes to the ether without so much as a "are you sure?" dialog. This is obviously a worst case scenario, but at literally three (two if you count ctrl+a as one ;) ) quick keyboard clicks and no confirmation, its a real worry to me. There are various less severe scenarios where I'd like to have a backup of all my mail somewhere. Trusting the IMAP server to never fail is quite risky in my opinion. Do you have a better way to keep a backup than what I am suggesting?

Also I like to keep a local copy of all mail as I am offline quite often and need to have all work related email to reference various things from years past.

Another reason is the speed in which I can search for old mail. For example if I have a client I want to contact again, but don't remember their name, I can look up the project number and the mail thread will be right there within a second or two. Google's online interface is quick enough to do this at about the same speed, but as for the mail on my justhost.com account, that could take several minutes before I get a full list of results.

An even more recent example was when I started this thread. I added my foo bar com account to Evolution, and copy pasted my local copies to the Inbox. I ended up with a bunch of duplicates and Evolution's "remove duplicates" was not able to remove them all for some reason. Now I have a total mess of an Inbox. The quickest way to fix this was to just delete everything and redump the local backup copies. How would you fix any large scale issue like this without a backup? 

>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.

Doesn't that depend on whether or not you enable the "Synchronize remote mail locally in all folders" option in Account Editor -> Receiving Options?

What I see locally is a mirror of what is on the mail server if I ssh into it after everything has synced. Am I overlooking something?

>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.

Thats an interesting idea, but how would I handle outgoing mail at that point? I'm not familiar with Offline IMAP, but if it is just syncing from the mail server (e.g. bar.com), and Evolution is just allowing me to view this locally sync'ed maildir, how would I use Evolution to reply to a message I am reading in this local maildir and have it send from my mail address of foo bar com?

Ideally I'd like the following setup:

1.) Something like Offline IMAP or Evolution's "Synchronize remote mail locally in all folders" to sync to a local maildir

2.) Have an incremental backup of this maildir (e.g rsnapshot on cron) so that I have an actual backup and not just a mirror

3.) Send and receive emails through Evolution

I'm still not exactly sure how step three would look exactly. Keep it as a cache only imap account? Then pull a copy of the sent message from the mail server via step 1?

Maybe a better question to the entire community would be how do you keep regularly scheduled backups of your mail? For self-hosted servers its a no-brainer, but for gmail accounts or other cloud hosted accounts, I'm really at a loss as to why I cannot find a standard way of doing this.

Looking forward to your insights!

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 1:21 AM Pete Biggs <pete biggs org uk> wrote:

> 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.


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