evolution 2.28.1 says "Summary doesn't match the folder contents" after deleting/moving mails in a big Inbox

Thank you for taking the time to report this issue and helping to make Ubuntu better. Examining the information you have given us, this does not appear to be a bug report so we are closing it and converting it to a question in the support tracker. We appreciate the difficulties you are facing, but it would make more sense to raise problems you are having in the support tracker at https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu if you are uncertain if they are bugs. For help on reporting bugs, see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs#When%20not%20to%20file%20a%20bug.

How is this not a bug if evolution fails to handle your mail correctly. Not being able to delete mail from a folder ("expunge") renders evolution almost useless. I'm seeing this same problem:
I cannot delete a folder because there are mails in that folder that cannot be deleted, I get the original error message when trying to delete those mails (or "emty trash").
There may be a workaround given in this thread:
http://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/evolution-muell-laesst-sich-nicht-leeren-fehl/?highlight=download#post-1969193

Doing as described in the thread that I linked to earlier, it seems I was able to fix this issue:
# evolution --force-shutdown
# cp -a ~/.evolution /media/evo.sav
# cd ~/.evolution/mail/local
# find . -name "*.cmeta" -exec rm -f {} \;
# find . -name "*.ibex.index.data" -exec rm -f {} \;
# find . -name "*.ibex.index" -exec rm -f {} \;
Manually deleted the offending folder.
# evolution --component=mail --offline
(got one warning about the evolution not being able to open the deleted folder)
More mails appeared in trash that I was not able to select, delete, empty
Clicked through all folders to recreate the metadata.
Closed evolution.
# evolution --component=mail --online
Checked for new mails - everything seems to work fine.

I got to fix the problem with a similar process as kamome described, but (a) the process was a pain in the posterior because massive amounts of deleted mails reappeared in their original folders which then had to be hand-deleted, and (b) the problem reappeared just a day or two later.

At that point, I gave up and returned to Thunderbird.

My system is 9.04, evolution 2.26.1-0ubuntu2 by the way.
Now, the original post came from a de_DE.UTF-8 system, mine is too. Joachim's name does have a german sound, too - of course, there is a big ubuntu community in germany, but, as there only seem to be german (or german spoken?) posters on this bug, could this be related to a german system?

I had the same error message. Although the error named other folders the corrupt folder was the inbox folder. After I deleted the inbox folder I was able to run the trash and delete the hidden deleted files without warning.

I got the same issue... Maybe it is somehow related to the German system? I am also German... :-)
However, the workaround didnt work at all, not even for a moment.

My evolution 2.28.1 does this too lately!

I think, this is a very serious one. Please set the importance adequately!

My details:
I did not install additional packages like evolution-plugins-experimental. My Ubuntu 9.10 runs in german too. I have quite big mail folders (some are 150 MB). The workaround of comment #4 does work, but only if applied immediately after the error occurs. And after deleting/moving another ten or more mails with a single click/drag, some of them do not disappear, and the folder is again not in sync with its summary.

(evolution:3791): camel-local-provider-WARNING **: Summary doesn't match the folder contents! eek!
  expecting offset 95488924 got 95616241, state = 2

The problem seems limited to a very big local Inbox folder. My Inbox collects mails from three POP accounts and is 178 MB. One of the accounts is configured to "leave messages on server".

Now I found a "solution" for me: it's comment #4, but slightly modified: I shut down evolution, renamed Inbox to Inbox2 (and Inbox.sbd to Inbox2.sbd). I deleted all *index*, *meta*, and *cache* in .evolution/mail/local/ and restarted evolution offline. To my surprise all messages in Inbox seemed to reappear (from where??). But clicking on them showed "the message does not exist". Thus I selected them all and pressed Delete. This gave me finally an empty Inbox and a 178 MB Inbox2. Since then I moved/copied/deleted hundreds of mails to and from Inbox2 with no problems.

So just don't let your Inbox grow to 100 MB or more. (this is a good advice anyway ;-)

I found that this is an already known bug:
http://www.go-evolution.org/Camel.Local#Mbox_bugs

Please consider to include the mentioned fix (the "CamelDS.Local disksummary branch") into Lucid Lynx 10.04 LTS!