Re: Evolution email (problem?) (IMAP, Gmail, email compacting)
On Sun, 2023-04-30 at 20:47 +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 30, 2023 at 06:26:53PM +0100, Tixy wrote:
> > On Sun, 2023-04-30 at 11:19 -0400, Default User wrote:
> > > (BTW, if anyone does have information about compacting folders in
> > > Evolution, I would love to hear about it!)
> >
> > What is 'compacting', what is it meant to do? [...]
>
> > If it just means really deleting email, then you can select the
> > menu
> > option File > Empty Wastebasket which does that for all accounts.
> > Or
> > for just a single account, right click on it's Wastebasket. There
> > is
> > also Folder > Expunge which I believe does it for a single folder.
>
> This is probably the intended meaning. For strange historical reasons
> (mbox), reclaiming the space of a deleted mail used to be a non
> trivial
> operation, so the user interface separated both: marking single mails
> for deletion and actually doing it (which went by different names,
> like "expunge", possibly "compact" -- the latter reminiscent of
> crushing
> the holes left in a linear mbox).
>
> That user interface proved useful for other reasons (time for
> remorse),
> so it stuck, probably.
>
> So yes, wastebasket emptying is probably it.
>
> Cheers
Hi, Tomas.
Okay, it looks like Evolution does indeed use the MAILDIR format. See:
https://help.gnome.org/users/evolution/stable/import-supported-file-formats.html.en
which says,
"The format used by Evolution (for local folders since version 3.0).
There is no need to import Maildir files as you can configure a Maildir
account in Evolution and point to the folder where the Maildir files
are stored."
And according to:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/compacting-folders
MBOX is the default format, where all of a folder's messages are stored
in a single file on disk. This is where the compact process is useful,
and the purpose of this article is to explain how and why.
Maildir is a newer storage format, where every message of a folder is a
separate file. Maildir does not need compact, and so this article is
not applicable to Maildir folders.
So, apparently Evolution does not need "compacting"!
BTW, interesting that Thunderbird seems to still use the mbox format by
default, although you can apparently choose to store messages in either
mbox or maildir format. Which is why they explain and offer the choice
to users.
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