Re: [Evolution] Help me understand something please

[Milan Crha <mcrha redhat com>]

On Wed, 2022-06-29 at 12:30 -0500, Tim McConnell via evolution-list
wrote:
> I copied one of the cron reports into an email and
> attached the original one sent and sent it to myself in gmail. 

        Hi,
I meant to use exactly the same message, not a newly created message,
to not compare apples and oranges. The newly created message can have
some things changed. I expected you'll either drag&drop the message
from On This Computer/Inbox to an IMAP account, or you right-click the
same message and pick Copy To Folder... and then choose an IMAP folder.

> But if I go into "On This Computer-> Inbox and view mail the CPU goes
> crazy.

Being it true, with exactly the same message, then I still do not
understand what the WebKitGTK would have to do with it, because it's
independent of the mail storage. That would cause high CPU usage on the
evolution process, maybe due to some issues in the local storage, as
had been suggested in another mail of this thread.

The way to recreate the index here is to remove
   ~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local/folders.db
file. That will lost mail labels and such. It can happen the SQLite
table gets too large over time or it broke due to async writes the
libcamel uses. There are tools to verify consistency of an SQLite
table, which can detect certain issues (though not all).

Let me reply to some points from the subthread of this message:

* if the Edit->Preferences->Mail Accounts says "maildir", then it means
  maildir. No way to say maildir and use mbox under the hood

* there are stored some helper files around conversion from mbox to
  maildir and then from one maildir version to another and the message
  about conversion from mbox to maildir Tim saw was shown only because
  the files were missing - I guess Tim did not delete all the files
  in the ~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local/ , aka the directory 
  itself, because new users do not see such conversion prompt

* the migration from mbox renames the
  ~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local/
  to some other directory name, possibly "local_mbox" Tim mentioned.
  The messages might be still there, hopefully, in hidden directories
  (with a leading dot in the name), still in the Maildir format

* even if the On This Computer was mbox, the read from that store is
  instant, because there is stored where the actual message starts
  in the file, thus the read just moves to that place and the message
  is read. The problem with mbox is editing the file, which means to
  rewrite it, while we are talking about read here

* the exercise around local delivery was unnecessary, from my point
  of view. Once the message is stored under On This Computer it's under
  On This Computer, no matter whether it went there from a POP account,
  local delivery, copied there by a user,...

I think it's it. I'm sorry, if I forgot to respond to anything.

        Bye,
        Milan