11.10 upgrade and deleted Evolution email

[WVPARN]

I wish I hadn't bothered with the upgrade. I figured it would be harmless. After the upgrade, Evolution deleted all my email.

I also don't like the reduced options for appearance. Before I had many more options for changing the appearance. There were a lot of skins available.

In gedit the "." is very tiny. It's extremely hard to see it now.

Instead of having programs minimized to a convenient bar, they are on this launcher, which behaves oddly, and I don't like it. Why can't something like that be a matter of taste?

But mostly I don't understand why Evolution would delete my email. Months and months of mail. Why is an application messing with data files? That's something I would expect of Windows 3.1.

[WVPARN]

Hi. If you are an Evolution user, please be warned that upgrading to Ubuntu 11.10 may cause your email to be deleted. There are numerous complaints out about this.

The upgrade screen should incorporate a notice about this problem.

Thank you.

[bultmann]

I had the same problem. I figured since Thunderbird is now the new default mail client, the upgrade would automatically migrate all my emails over from Evolution! But that didn't happen So I opened Evolution, just to find that this didn't work either. It actually shows my old emails in the inbox, but I can't load a single one of them.

So I did some digging around and a lot of searching on the internet. I finally found that the Evolution emails get stored in ~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local. I found that all the emails are still there, but they don't show up in Evolution. So I made a copy of the whole local folder and played with copying some files since some of the file names seemed funny. At some point I got a message that Evolution switched to a new format for the stored emails. I think that's what screwed everything up.

So I know that my emails are all there, but in the wrong format. Does anyone know how I can import them into Thunderbird now?

[haqking]

Just so you both know, BACKUPS are important, including your email.

Before upgrading anything have backups, in Evolution you can import and export very easily

[WVPARN]

I dig it about backups, but I thought that email was pretty much an understood technology now. The last I heard of a client bashing up emails was Outlook in the mid-90s.

And thanks to bultmann!! My emails are there also. So now I can play with that.

[peril2]

Too late for me. What an <snip> thing to do! Is there a known fix!

[NoNameWill]

I still have evolution installed along with thunderbird after the upgrade. Have you looked to see if /.local/share/evolution is still there?

Sorry didn't read the whole thread. Mark as solved

[NoNameWill]

The evolution folder is still in the /.local/share/

Evolution for me didn't uninstall. I didn't do anything to keep it during the upgrade.

[cariboo]

I merged two similar threads

[bultmann]

Ok, I figured out how to move all my emails from Evolution over to Thunderbird. Everything is working great now and Thunderbird is way faster than Evolution!

If you want to restore your emails in Evolution, I have no idea how to do this, but here's what I did to get them into Thunderbird:

First, close Thunderbird if you have it open. Then open Nautilus and go to this Thunderbird folder:
~/.thunderbird/blmixhz7.default/Mail/Local Folders

I suspect that the blmixhz7.default could be different in your installation, but it would be something similar.

Open another Nautilus browser or a second pane and go to this directory:

~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local/

In there you will find several files like Inbox, Inbox.cmeta, Inbox.ibex.index, etc. Same thing for folders like Sent and Drafts. Copy only those files that don't have any dots in them (Inbox, Sent, Drafts) into the Thunderbird folder (Local Folders).

Next, if you had any folders as subfolders of Inbox, then you will have a folder .inbox_sbd in your .../mail/local folder. Go into that folder and again copy all the files that have no dots in them into the Thunderbird folder. Similarly, if you had any subfolders of subfolders, you will have something like .inbox_sbd.subfolder_sbd. Again, go into that folder and copy the files without a dot into the Thunderbird folder.

Now restart Thunderbird and you should see all your folders and their files under Local Folders. Unfortunately this procedure doesn't maintain the original folder structure, so you just have to select all the subfolders and drag them into the correct folder.