Since I already use evolution for my calendar needs on my laptop, I thought it would be ideal to also use it for email. So I went through adding all of my email accounts tediously to evolution and all seemed good as they started to sync.

However, suddenly multiple folders failed to sync on my gmail IMAP account. I tried to refresh the account and download everything again but Evolution fails out on downloading all of my email. So I open up the debug log and see errors like Incomplete server response: no information provided for message 1401. Wonderful. After some googling around, I found this bug which describes my exact problem.

Good right? Nope! Unfortunately it looks like an ancient bug that no one cares to fix and it’s “working as intended” as far as I can tell from the responses. This effectively terminates my ability to use Evolution as my email client as I don’t have the time or patience to go through 500 broken emails and deleting them manually just so Evolution doesn’t throw a wobbly over a corrupt email.

If anyone knows a fix for this problem I’d love to hear it, but as far as I can tell I’m effectively barred from using Evolution for email without manually going in and nuking crap off gmail. Quite disappointing really, considering almost every other email client such as Claws Mail or Thunderbird does not have this problem.