Folder organization & placement

I have two well-established EVO instances in our house and neither is set up correctly, I think. Your advice is welcome.

Case #1 is POP3. 6.5 G of mail, all in sub-folders under the Inbox. In my mind, that is WAY too much. Instead, shouldn’t the sub-folders be directly under On This Computer? If so, how would I do that, since I can’t Move Folder To the On This Computer. I can create a new folder under On This Computer and move sub-folders under that. is that a better option, to move all of this mail out of the giant Inbox?

Case #2 is IMAP. Based webmail portal of this user’s account, it looks like some folders are Inbox sub-folders, and some folders were created off of the account, one level up. This doesn’t seem like a best-practice, either. Should that be changed?

rsv869

Hi, please always provide your Evolution version. I do not understand why you think something is not “set up correctly”. Or which actual problems when using Evolution there are. You are free to create subfolders if you want to have subfolders. Please describe clear steps to reproduce some problem (as a list (!) of steps) which leave zero room for any interpretation. Thanks a lot!

Hello, and thx for the reply. Sorry for not giving enough info:

Computer on case #1 is running Pop3 on version 3.44.4, on Mint, kernel 5.15
Computer on case #2 is running IMAP on version 3.46.4, on Manjaro, kernel 5.15

The question, in both cases, is about where to locate sub-folders. In case #1 all the sub-folders are off the Inbox, so, in effect, all mail is in the Inbox, leading to 6.5G in the Inbox. That doesn’t seem right. If I create (or move) these sub-folders outside the Inbox, to “On this Computer” is that a better idea?

It’s possible I don’t understand how “On this Computer” is different from what’s in the account(s).

rsv869

I don’t know how you found out that the Inbox (which one?) is 6.5GB. And what makes you think that this “doesn’t seem right”. Please provide the exact steps that you performed somehow somewhere. :slight_smile:
For physical locations on your machine, see the Evolution help in Evolution, or Data storage locations

“On this computer” is basically only relevant for POP accounts, it is not used by IMAP accounts (except for storing outgoing emails in the Outbox until they got sent, and if you have not defined remote folders for Drafts and Sent in the IMAP account preferences).

I’m most concerned about case #1, the POP3 account. I have two ways to get at the size: The mail service provider has a web portal showing the amount of space taken on their servers, which is 6.5G . Also, I look at properties for .local/share/evolution, which shows about 12G. That is such a big difference from the provider’s count that I assume I don’t really understand everything that’s being counted, so I’m guessing the provider’s tool is a more accurate measurement. Which would you believe?

Since “On This Computer” is relevant for POP, would it be a good idea to move these Inbox folders into that space, out of the Inbox, if only to clear up the clutter?

Have you expunged your local folders / emptied your local trash in Evolution? Also, by default POP mail is downloaded to your device. POP mail by default is not kept server-side.

I don’t see how or why moving around stuff would reduce the size of stuff. Please elaborate.

Nothing in Trash.
EVO is configured to keep 5 days of mail on the server, and that works as expected, based on what I see in the webmail portal. Five days of Inbox mail (looking at just the Inbox) is there.

This is what is confusing me: In addition to the webmail Inbox, all of its Inbox sub-folders are also shown, too, and all the years of mail with them of course. But I guess that’s because all those folders were created off of the EVO Inbox, well, they’re ALL in the Inbox? I guess. And maybe that makes sense, since the sub-folders were created in EVO maybe it’s to be expected that they would show up on the portal, too. Thus all the mail on the server.

But if I set up a different POP email client, like Thunderbird, it pulls mail, the Inbox only arrives, and not the sub-folders.

That’s why I was asking about moving the EVO folders out from under the Inbox, to clear this up a bit.

Does that make sense at all?

EVO is configured to keep 5 days of mail on the server, and that
works as expected, based on what I see in the webmail portal.
Five days of Inbox mail (looking at just the Inbox) is there.

Hi,

do you mean you’ve only 5 days of mails on the server and the server
reports 6GB of mail quota being used? That looks like the server-side
Trash is not emptied. Unless you receive either a lot of small messages
within the past 5 days or they are truly large (megabytes to gigabytes
per message). That being said, if you really have 5 days of mails worth
6GB of data, then evo using 10GB on the dist with mails for 10+ days is
a toy, is it not? Though I do not think it’s the case, I’d rather thing
the server-side Trash is full of the old messages.

This is what is confusing me: In addition to the webmail Inbox, all
of its Inbox sub-folders are also shown, too, and all the years of
mail with them of course. But I guess that’s because all those
folders were created off of the EVO Inbox, well, they’re ALL in the
Inbox? I guess.

Where are “all of its Inbox sub-folders” also shown, please? In the web
interface or in the Evolution? POP3 is a one-way protocol, it only
downloads messages, it does not upload them. By default (server side),
there is downloaded only Inbox folder content of a POP3 account. Most
servers I know of do not allow to download other than the Inbox from
the server when POP3 is used.

I understood you use IMAP and POP3 for the same account, only on two
machines. Would it make sense to use IMAP on both machines? If you’ve a
need to delete messages from the server older than 5 days, then it can
be done easily with message filters, including moving the messages
under On This Computer.

The POP3 account always downloads messages into On This Computer/Inbox.
It doesn’t matter where you move them afterwards, manually or by a
filter, they are always in the On This Computer/Inbox. Moving them
around won’t fix the problem you think you have. I agree with Andre,
there is no problem in the folder structure. Changing it won’t fix
anything.

That you see ~/.local/share/evolution/ of that large kind of makes
sense. The mails are under ~/.local/share/evolution/mail/ and you
should see there at least two directories, one named ‘local’, which
corresponds to the On This Computer in the GUI, and one named by the
POP3 account UID - that contains information about the POP3 messages,
including a uid-cache file (that contains list of recognized messages
on the server; each line corresponds to one message, thus the count of
the lines should match the count of the messages in the server’s
Inbox). The POP3 has its own cache of the downloaded messages, which
are copied into the On This Computer. It means the messages are stored
on the disk twice. The POP3 cache is supposed to remove messages when
they are deleted from the server. There are also folders.db files,
which contain information visible in the message list in the GUI. That
file can be large as well, depending on the count of messages. It’s an
SQLite3 database file, which can be vacuumed, when there are a lot of
fragmented pages. The new Evolution does that periodically, after
message deletion/expunge and other actions. You should not usually
bother of the folders.db files.

Anyway, all of this is very low level technical information regular
users might not need to know or care about. The important bit of
information from it for you is that moving messages around under the On
This Computer account won’t help with the disk usage for that account.

Bye,
Milan

Hello Milan and Andre-
I think I got to the bottom of this issue, and it’s a self-create situation. Won’t waste any more of your time.

Thx for the help.

rsv869

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