Fixing Corrupt Mail Folders in Evolution

I normally find that Evolution is a very stable and very functional piece of software. But if it does end abnormally (by a sudden, and unexpected system restart, for example), the database managing the various mailbox files and folders can become corrupted. It’s taken me all morning to find a solution – one that turned out to be annoyingly simple in its effectiveness.

The Evolution error messages are a bit terse and corrupted data can be indicated by one or more of the following error messages:

• Emptying Trash Fails with ‘Error while expunging folder’
• Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync
• Error while Expunging folder
• Evolution: error storing ‘~/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox (mbox)’

The solution that finally worked was this one:

• Close Evolution client
• Move file /home/dc/.evolution/mail/local/folders.db to trash
• Restart Evolution again. It will rebuild the database and everything should synch successfully.

Poking around various bug trackers did suggest that there have also been problems with some of the metadata files. So if the above fix on its own doesn’t work, it might be worth trying the following:

• Switch Evolution to Offline mode (File -> Work Offline)
• Close Evolution client
• Shut down Evolution: evolution --force-shutdown
• Remove the metadata files:
• • find ~/.evolution/mail/local -name "*ev-summary" -exec rm -f {} ;
  • find .evolution -name *index.data -exec rm -f {} ;
  • find .evolution -name *index -exec rm -f {} ;
  • find .evolution -name *cmeta -exec rm -f {} ;
• Start Evolution client
• Wait until the status bar at the bottom is empty. This could take several seconds.
• Close Evolution client. This may take a while
• Start Evolution client
• Switch Evolution back to Online mode (File -> Work Online)

If all else fails, you can always delete everything and start again:

• Backup your files! (File -> Backup Settings)
• Start deleting:
• • rm -rf ~/.evolution
  • rm -rf ~/.gconf/apps/evolution
  • evolution –force-shutdown
• Find the process ID for ‘gconfd’: ps -ef|grep gconfd.
  This will return a line that looks like this:
  YourUserID 1485 1 0 13:56 ? 00:00:03 /usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconfd-2
  The 1485, in this case is the process ID
• Kill that process: kill 1485
• Start Evolution client. You will be prompted to start creating your accounts.