Evolution index and summary files cleanup

Caution: use the information on this page at your own risk. Using the commands and procedures here incorrectly could destroy your email data.

From time to time I have problems with Evolution where the application crashes at unexpected and unwelcome moments. Also it sometimes becomes slow, I expect the reason to be indexing problems. Therefor I have worked out the following commands to erase the summary and index files for my evolution installation.

This is on my OpenSUSE installation so please verify the file locations before executing these commands.

Information on the Evolution mailbox files can be found here:
www.go-evolution.org/Camel.Local

The files you can safely delete are:

• .cmeta
• .ibex.index
• .ibex.index.data
• .ev-summary

Update May 2011: On one occasion my Evolution did not want to start at all and was stuck in a preparing message list state. I had already deleted the index files as described below but that didn't work. I then deleted the folders.db file and after that my evolution started again.

The first time you start Evolution after deleting the index files it will recreate the files so starting Evolution will take longer. Also for individual folders indexes will be rebuilt when you access those folders for the first time.

To list the files of that type use the following command (with the cmeta files as an example)

find ~/.evolution/ -name "*cmeta*"

To delete all files that contain cmeta use the following command:

find ~/.evolution/ -name "*cmeta*" -exec rm {} \;

Replace cmeta with the other file names to find and replace those files.

Here is ready to run script that deletes all necessary files:

Update May 2011: The location of the evolution files has changed to ~/.local/share/evolution in openSUSE 11.4

#!/bin/bash
find ~/.evolution/ -name "*cmeta*" -exec rm {} \;
find ~/.evolution/ -name "*ibex.index*" -exec rm {} \;
find ~/.evolution/ -name "*ev-summary*" -exec rm {} \;