Moving from Evolution to Konqueror
After several weeks of good behaviour from Evolution 2.4 since the Mandriva 2006 upgrade, I started getting a wierd error on sending messages *(Mail From response Error Unknown). Nothing within my settings for Evolution had changed since the night before when things worked… I tested with Kontact and was able to send mail, closed it, opened it, bonobo-slay’ed it… still getting the error, so… since I was on the fence as to whether or not I was going to migrate to Kontact, I went ahead with it. I’ve already covered moving the calendar and contact (addressbook) information in a previous post. So this will be on moving the messages.
The only fix I’ve seen suggested for it is to clean out any and all comments and white space from your /etc/hosts file. I don’t have any comments there and no whitespace either. The only thing peculiar I see is that the loopback isn’t listed first. (Changing that hasn’t solved it.)
Anyway, I guess I wasn’t too intent on staying with evolution so, I started moving things over to Kontact. I started by backing up /home/myusername/.evolution/mail/local folder to /home/myusername/.evolution/mail/localbackup – then I tried kmailcvt which froze on importing messages. I could have left it longer, but after about 15 minutes and no visible progress past 13% I killed it and deleted the 50 or so messages that had imported. Under Evolution I had a lot of nested folders to archive old messages. Copying folders from imap isn’t something that looks as easily done with Kontact as it is to copy folders to imap in evolution. (I can copy individual messages only, not folders in Kontact.) So… I took a look at moving the contents of /home/myusername/.evolution/mail/localbackup to the /home/myusername/.Mail directory – Everything in Evolution is in the mbox format. The default for Kontact (Kmail) is mdir, but it reads mbox as well.
After getting things over I noticed a couple things. 1) There was a lot of clutter in Kmail with evolutions extra files. (For each mbox file there were several support files (some starting with .’s so their hidden.)) 2)The subdirectories weren’t visible. Both issues were easily fixed. Kmail deals with subdirectories by putting the mbox files in a folder called .parentfolder.directory where “parentfolder” is the name of the folder that the subdirectory resides in. So, I have a genealogy folder with subfolders for various family names. Those family name mbox’s need to go in the .genealogy.directory folder… Evolution deals with subdirectorys by calling them genealogy.sbd with the mbox file inside (and all the support files.) So, all I had to do was mv genealogy.sbd to .genealogy.directory and clean out all the “extra” evolution files.
After that all seems well. Kontact is a bit different in a couple of ways, but this move will hopefully give me some incentive to organize my inbox a bit more and clean out some messages I don’t need. I’m also considering converting some of these mboxes to maildir format. (I see some advantages to having each message as a seperate file.)