Evolution with a mail box configured with MS Exchange as the mail server doesn't work that great. I have had issues before, so I make it a point not to sync mails to my local machine, instead I store it on the Exchange server itself. I also point my Drafts and Sent Items to the Exchange server. This helps me in accessing my mails, drafts and send folders anytime anywhere using my OWA URL; especially when my evolution client behaves weird - as it happened today.
I can't remember any specific reason why it happened, however this morning when i started 'Evolution' it just did not open. The client appeared in the status bar for a few seconds and then disappeared.
I didn't want to waste time nor did I know how to debug. I decided to clean up my Exchange related meta directories from the Evolution meta directory(~/.evolution).
I fired this command:
find ~/.evolution -name "exchange" -exec rm -rf {} \;
Tried starting Evolution again. It did not work. Tried a few times to no avail. I went ahead and deleted the "~/.evolution" directory; with the same results. I also tried reinstalling evolution and related packages, even that was of no use.
I logged in as a different user and tried configuring the same mailbox. This worked as expected and proved my assumption that Evolution installation was fine, but there was some sort of corrupted data from my previous configuration that the evolution-connector package was holding on to.
I logged in again as the old user and started Evolution from the command line using plugin disabled option (evolution --disable-eplugin). Once Evolution was running I deleted my previous mailbox from the GUI and stopped it. To be safe I did a force shutdown (evolution --force-shutdown) from the command line and then deleted all Evolution related meta data (rm -rf ~/.evolution, rm -rf ~/.spamassasin).
I restarted Evolution and recreated my profile. Huff... here i am
blogging through my email client - Evolution.
