Mail Backup in Gnome Evolution

Some of you may know Gnome Evolution project which is a complete Outlook-like solution for Linux with contacts, calendars, mail client and god knows what else. I kind of like it as it has some indexing features allowing me to search through the years of letters in a reasonable time. It basically performs well, but recently I found that it started to slow down.

It wasn’t until my mail base grew big enough having about 10K messages at a present. Pretty good and solid number, no? Unfortunately, Evolution engine doesn’t think so. Hardly had we got over 7-8K when it became really slow clearing and re-indexing things after the mail box checks. It took seconds to complete a simple check and it hung for a while, doing some “expunging” as they say.

I had a plan X. I wished to backup whole mail base, then remove all the mail older than a month manually and continue with a nearly blank lists. It should unload Evolution allowing it to do quicker, that’s obvious. The execution of the plan didn’t even started. Where I stuck was a clear understanding of that I wouldn’t be able to look through my past email in the backup. For me it’s dead necessary to have a chance to pick letters from the past.

I did several attempts to find an utility application which would allow me to do scans through backups and display letters, but I couldn’t find any.

Do you know any of them? Or maybe there’s a better recipe?