Migrating mail from Evolution local storage to Evolution + local Imap (dovecot with Maildir) 1/X

I’ve been fed up with Evolution being so buggy and slow, which was making managing my mail ever more painful as time passes. Still, one of the advantages of Evolution over other MUAs is the vfolders feature, which I’ve been using intensively for years. Would there be some alternate way of managing my mail ?

I’ve been reading about notmuch‘s progress in becoming a very powerful mail management / retrieval tool (it could very well replace the vfolder feature of Evolution), but unfortunately, it is not (yet) integrated with Evolution.

Others have documented their mail setup, and it seems that I could achieve a middle ground solution by migrating all my mail folders, currently stored inside Evolution’s local storage, into Maildir folders managed by a local dovecot IMAP server. Evolution would still be my MUA, but it would store my mail inside Maildirs through dovecot. I’ve been told that Evolution may be less buggy with IMAP than with local folders, which could solve my main annoyances. Also, it would make it possible to index mail with notmuch, as it supports the Maildir storage format.

I’ve then decided to take the opportunity of a holiday period to start the migration attempt.

I’ll document it in another post.