As an otherwise happy Evolution user, I was envious to Thunderbird users because of some of the plugins they have. One of the more useful ones is the Remove Duplicate Messages extension. A sane email client doesn’t create duplicates of course, but when you move mailboxes around, switch from an IMAP server to another, or restore mail from your backups after a disaster, it is easy to accidentally create hundreds of duplicates. (My recent return to Gmail since they started offering IMAP comes to mind!)

Today I was browsing the Evolution FAQ just to see what it’s like and whether there are any cool Evo tricks I don’t know about. There are, and I also found out about the existence of a remove-duplicates-plugin!

Evolution remove-duplicates-plugin

The plugin builds nicely on Ubuntu Gutsy, and after restarting Evolution you can go and enable the plugin. Then simply select all messages in a folder and find a new “Remove duplicates” entry in the context menu.

Comments

20 Responses to “Getting rid of duplicate messages in Evolution”

  1. Krešimir Tonković on November 20th, 2007 5:28 pm

    Un ubuntu gutsy, you need to install evolution-dev to be able to compile this plugin.

  2. Clair on November 21st, 2007 8:15 pm

    Thanks for the tip. Will check it out soon. :)

  3. TuxFeed › tales from the offtopic #17: upgrade frenzy on December 2nd, 2007 6:41 pm

    [...] Getting rid of duplicate messages in Evolution (2) [...]

  4. TuxFeed › tales from the offtopic #20: solved on January 16th, 2008 5:36 pm

    [...] Getting rid of duplicate messages in Evolution (3) This was written by . Posted on Wednesday, January 16, 2008, at 2:23 pm. Filed under Ubuntu. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Post a comment or leave a trackback. [...]

  5. Como remover mensagens duplicadas no Evolution | Leonardo Fontenelle on April 23rd, 2008 5:40 am

    [...] Na maior parte das distribuições, é necessário instalar tanto o Evolution quanto o evolution-dev (não é o caso do Gentoo). Baixe o plug-in, e execute o famoso ./configure; make; sudo make install. Deixe o código-fonte num canto, para o caso de querer executar um dia o sudo make uninstall. Obrigado a Juha K. Siltala pela dica! [...]

  6. Removing duplicate messages in Evolution | Leonardo Fontenelle on April 23rd, 2008 5:46 am

    [...] the way, thanks for the tip, Juha K. [...]

  7. Orfintain on October 28th, 2008 9:25 pm

    configure: error: Package requirements (
    evolution-plugin-2.4 >= 2.3.2
    ) were not met.
    Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
    installed software in a non-standard prefix.

    Alternatively you may set the REMOVE_DUPLICATES_PLUGIN_CFLAGS and REMOVE_DUPLICATES_PLUGIN_LIBS environment variables
    to avoid the need to call pkg-config. See the pkg-config man page for
    more details.

    What did i do wrong?

  8. topyli on October 28th, 2008 9:47 pm

    @Orfintain: Either your build environment is not correct (no development libraries), or the plugin doesn’t build against the current Evolution.

  9. Yi on November 16th, 2008 12:17 pm

    Thank you!

  10. Tbxlzuid on December 13th, 2008 10:33 pm

    Thanks!,

  11. Carlos Jimenez on January 6th, 2009 5:34 pm

    on Hardy need
    sudo apt-get install evolution-dev to compile.

    ./configure
    sudo make install

    that’s all.

    it works for me.

  12. Michael on January 18th, 2009 4:05 am

    indeed, installing evolution-dev on ubuntu helps with the above configure problem. thx for the hint!

  13. Len » Remove duplicate mails on January 23rd, 2009 8:17 pm

    [...] edit: this post describes the existence of a remove duplicates plugin, well, at least python coding does wonders [...]

  14. Valentine on April 9th, 2009 4:46 am

    Extraordinarity: ,

  15. Boris Baran on May 12th, 2009 7:50 pm

    @Carlos Jimenez on January 6th, 2009 5:34 pm
    YOU RULE!! I got the same error msg like Orfintain, taped the command from your post and then it worked. THX^(100^100)!!!

  16. pmorton on May 14th, 2009 3:17 pm

    configure: error: Package requirements (
    evolution-plugin-2.4 >= 2.3.2
    ) were not met.
    Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
    installed software in a non-standard prefix.

    On Jaunty, evolution.dev doesn’t help with this error

  17. Матвей Рыбин on May 20th, 2009 7:43 pm

    Отличная статья. Много чего нового узнал для себя. Автору респект и уважуха :)

  18. Марк on June 7th, 2009 4:07 pm

    Конечно! Это точно всем пригодится.

  19. Алексей Гусев on June 13th, 2009 2:01 am

    Информация занимательная. Спасибо. Хотелось бы только апдейтов почаще

  20. Семен Соколов on June 19th, 2009 1:55 am

    Любое искусство, особенно нетрадиционное, всегда вызывало ожесточенные споры. Думаю, оно просто имеет право на существование, вот и всё!

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