[Evolution-users] Save local synchronization to local folders while server is offline

[Milan Crha]

On Tue, 2025-08-12 at 07:58 +0200, David Lecompte wrote:
> Is there a way to do such a copy? Or another alternative to preserve
> those messages so that I can put them back on the server once it
> becomes available again?

	Hi,
when Evolution is online, it always tries to connect to the server
first, only then it runs the actual operation. It's kinda dull in your
case, though it works well in other cases.

Try to switch Evolution into the offline state, either by File->Work
Offline, or by running it from a terminal with `evolution --offline` .

Otherwise, local cache of a remote account is stored under

   ~/.cache/evolution/mail/<account-uid>/

What precisely the directory contains depends on the account type. For
the IMAP account this directory contains a subdirectory called
`folders`, which then contains respective folders and if it has any
messages they are stored in a `cur` subdirectory. The messages are
stored in the same way they are stored on the server and can be
imported into the Evolution, or you can concatenate them into an MBOX
format (it requires special processing, both adding a delimiter between
the messages and escaping the messages to not contain accidental
delimiter in the text, thus better to use some tool for it) or even
better create a test folder under On This Computer, then search for it
under ~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local/ - say you named it "xxx" and
placed it directly under the On This Computer, then it'll be:
~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local/.xxx/ on the disk. It'll contain
`cur`, `new` and `tmp` directories, which belong to the Maildir format.
You can copy the message files in the
`~/.local/share/evolution/mail/local/.xxx/new/`
then select the folder in the Evolution and when you'll leave it (move
away to another folder), then it'll notice you've new messages and will
show them. It's a more manual work, but requires no changes of the
message content, which is better, because such changes can break
(digital) message signatures.

	Bye,
	Milan