Comment 32 for bug 197290

Dear all, i have just recently run into this problem and i was helped by the suggestion of using evolution in windows. It lead me to better understand how evolution works and stores emails. Outlook, for those familiar with it, which stores all emails in one file unless other wise specified by the user. Evolution, on the other hand, creates a file for every folder the user create. For example, you normally begin with an Inbox folder and all emails in that folder will be stored in a file named Inbox and its location is userhomefolder/.evolution/mail/local (note that userhomefolder is named after yuor user name and .evolution is a hidden folder). So if you create another folder XYZ under the Inbox.sbd folder, Evolution will create a file named XYZ to store the emails in the XYZ folder and will also create a folder Inbox where the newly created XYZ file will be created for the file XYZ will be located in userhomefolder/.evolution/mail/local/Inbox.sbd. That is it for the geography lesson. As for the size, I think that whenever any single file size grow over 2GB it will cause a problem. It should take a long time to happen but the REASON why my Inbox went over 2GB was that the only folder for which there is no corresponding file to store emails is the Trash folder. All emails in the Trash are stored in the folder file from which they originate. A big part of the reason is what I think is a real BUG in Evolution, which is whenever you move emails from the Inbox or any folder to another folder for organization sake, Evolution copy it to the Trash folder. This means that it keeps the moved email stored in the original folder file even though it does not appear in the folder any more. This also happens when an email is sent if saved during composition or before sending at any stage. So the key to not go through this again is to empty the Trash folder periodically and also monitor the files storing you emails on your hard drive not to allow them to reach 2GB and you do that by starting a new serial folder like XYZ, XYZ1 and so on.