I have given up on this project. My goal was to get Evolution to work properly, and it seems that the current version does not. There is a known bug that prevents the spam filters from working properly, and that makes it useless for me.
So I reloaded the VM from an old backup, and futzed with the email files to make them current. I still have to rsync the two VMs to get the files updated too, but that is pretty easy to do.