Evolution has been acting weird for me on my 64-bit machine. Radom characters seem to be getting inserted in messages, which screws up their rendering and their listing. I submitted a bug for this, but I have no clue why this is happening. Could it be my obsession for keeping all my emails, making the database too big? Could it be my synching back and forth to the 32-bit laptop?

This was my cue to go forth and take residence in the Cloud.

I moved my Evolution calendars quite simply by exporting them as .ics and importing them in Google Calendar. The only thing that did not work well is the recurring appointments: those wound up ineditable (although I can delete them one by one).

I moved my Evolution contacts by exporting the address book as a VCard file and running a modified version of the scripts here, with some peeks to the information here and here. (My version of the script, warts and all, is here). There are a few remaining issues: IM-only contacts get imported as well (though it’s Evolution’s fault for not merging them correctly with the corresponding e-mail records) and some special characters remain escaped after importing to GMail. Most seriously, GMail does not currently deal with some of the information Evolution stores, such as birthdays and spouses. Maybe I’ll modify the script to add those fields as notes, though it would be great if the GMail team could add those as bona fide fields.

I performed this migration over the winter holidays, and thus far, I’ve been happy with the results. I’ll be sure to report the snafus I found to the appropriate folks.