Hi all, can't figure out how this essential operation can be done in Evolution. Looking for any advice or comment on archiving old mail.

I am running Evolution 3.2.3 on Ubuntu 12.04

Part of the problem was: during the upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04 and threrefore Evo 2.x.x to Evo 3.2.3 and into the new mbox format of email storage, something has acted up and I ended up with tripples and quadruples of thousands of messages, so I now have folders with 100,000+ messages and Evolution is crawling so slow, it's barerly useful. I don't have time to go through all multiple copies right now and would like to just move all emails older than 3 months old into an archive in case I ever need any of them.

I tried to highlight messages and save them into an mbox file but this process ends up creating 4.5GB mbox files out of mere 1000 messages (whihout attachments, too!) and this is surely NOT the way to archive 100,000 messages.

Trying to use the "Backup" feature appears to archive the entire thing and it's bound to be just way too big of an archive file in the end. I would much rather prefer to pick which messages I'm actually archiving based on some simple criteria like the age.

So, is this essential feature simply missing in Evolution or I just don't go about it the right way? How would you archive away old messages in Evo 3.2.3?

Thanks!