GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 643530
mail folder inside .evolution/mail migrated by mistake
Last modified: 2021-05-19 11:36:47 UTC
Hey, I had a bug report from a Debian user saying that when migrating to freedesktop.org folders (from .evolution to .local/share/evolution), some mails were migrated with the config not updated and so the user at one point thought all the mail was gone. The downstream bug is at http://bugs.debian.org/615822 but basically, for local maildir accounts, you need to configure a folder path. In that case he chose a folder inside .evolution/mail (I guess to put every mail on the same place on the box and the delivery was done accordingly). At migration time, the folder was migrated to .local/share/evolution while it was not a local evolution cache folder, and as the account config wasn't updated, the maildir appeared empty in evo. I'm not sure it's a good idea to deliver mail to a folder inside evolution cache, but nothing prevented that and having all the local mail at the same place makes some sense, so it might be worth adding a check in the migration code to only migrate folders which are indeed owned by evolution.
Camel doesn't yet distinguish between data directories and cache directories, so the migration routine for mail is basically: mv ~/.evolution/mail $(XDG_DATA_HOME)/evolution/mail I guess we'll need to move the data piecemeal by registered accounts, although the user is ultimately at fault for setting up a Maildir account in a private application directory. Therefore, low priority. (Switching to Shell component since that's where the mail migration code lives.)
Yup, as I said it doesn't look like a good idea but in the meantime it's not prevented by the application and it makes some sense (“keep all my mail at the same place” or something like that). But yeah, fine tuning for cases like this is hard and might lead to causing more issues than solving ones.
GNOME is going to shut down bugzilla.gnome.org in favor of gitlab.gnome.org. As part of that, we are mass-closing older open tickets in bugzilla.gnome.org which have not seen updates for a longer time (resources are unfortunately quite limited so not every ticket can get handled). If you can still reproduce the situation described in this ticket in a recent and supported software version, then please follow https://wiki.gnome.org/Community/GettingInTouch/BugReportingGuidelines and create a new enhancement request ticket at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/evolution/-/issues/ Thank you for your understanding and your help.