Re: [Evolution] Duplicate Emails

[guenther <guenther rudersport de>]

> Occasionally I find that Evolution will hang when trying to download
> email from one of my POP mail accounts.  This usually results in my
> having to kill and restart Evolution.  Unfortunately this often
> results in Evolution re-downloading my entire POP mailbox rather than
> just downloading those messages that haven't been retrieved.  I keep
> my messages on the POP server for awhile, so when this happens
> Evolution will often re-download 2000 messages or more(however many
> happen to be in the mailbox at the time)..  Is there a way to prevent
> this from happening?  Short of that, is there a way to prune my mail
> folders from within Evolution to remove duplicate (or triplicate)
> mails?

Back in April I wrote a custom script to remove duplicate emails in mbox
folders and posted it on this list. See my post (the script and
instructions/warnings) on the archives:

http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution/2003-April/028416.html

I tested that script in a very small environment. It did work for me.
You really should backup all your data before, though!

I never got a response back. But I will be glad if it may be useful for
you.


Another warning: This script will fail, if you have whitespace in your
folder names!

Simon McClenahan found my script on the archives and mentioned that.
Thanks to him. He corrected the script:

--- dedupe.sh ---
#!/bin/sh
[ -e dedupe.mbox ] && echo 'panic: dedupe.mbox exists, exiting' && exit

cat "$1" | formail -D 8192 .msgid -s >> dedupe.mbox

mv -f dedupe.mbox "$1"
--- snipp ---

Then the command to execute would be:
% find . -name 'mbox' -print0  | xargs -0 -n 1 ./dedupe.sh


Use this, if you use whitespace. Looks good -- however, I did not test
this particular script.

Anyway, be warned and again: back up your data!


And drop a note, if it was helpful... ;-)

...guenther


-- 
char *t="\10pse\0r\0dtu\0  ghno\x4e\xc8\x79\xf4\xab\x51\x8a\x10\xf4\xf4\xc4";
main(){ char h,m=h=*t++,*x=t+2*h,c,i,l=*x,s=0; for (i=0;i<l;i++){ i%8? c<<=1:
(c=*++x); c&128 && (s+=h); if (!(h>>=1)||!t[s+h]){ putchar(t[s]);h=m;s=0; }}}