Re: [gentoo-user] kde 4.11.2, akonadi & Kmail2 problems (retrieving folder contents please wait)

[Mick]

On Wednesday 25 Dec 2013 08:41:25 Alexander Puchmayr wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> On Monday I upgraded from kde-4.10.5 to kde-4.11.2 (the latest release
> marked as 'amd64' on gentoo), but I had serious problems with kmail2:
>
> * I could not open any of my mail, kmail is always showing "Retrieving
> folder contents please wait". Didn't show up after more than one hour.
>
> * some akonadi process, kontact and mysqld kept more than two CPUS
> permanently busy.
>
> Consequently, I haven't been able to read my mail :-(
>
> I tried:
> * Restarting the akonadi resource for my local mailbox. No effekt.
> * Re-creating the databases by moving ~.local/share/akonadi to akonadi.orig
>   Akonadi recreated its database successfully, but at the end the same
> result. * Akonadi-console: The debugger shows so many entries per second
> that I could barely read them. Frequent hangs for a couple of minutes
> (thought it died, so I killed it, but then I saw it just had a very large
> timeout)
>
> Then I had to restore 4.10.5 from the backup.
>
> Now, some of my mail folders got messed up (Mails moved into wrong folders)
> Filters are messed up (rules to move to specific folders suddenyl point to
> different folders -- that explains the mails in wrong folders ... )
>
> Is there a way to re-initialize akonadi without risking to lose data and
> without having to recreate each and every rule I made?
>
> Best regards
> 	Alex

I really sympathise with you Alex because I have been through similar pains 
myself on one of my machines.  That was enough of a lesson for me not to allow 
this piece of ... to mess up any other boxen.  I'm still on kmail-1.13.7 and 
having thoughts of migrating to T'bird.

The only way I know of is to restore your akonadi from a back up and if need 
be your mail folder structure also from a backup.  Now if this problem was 
propagated to your mail server (assuming you run IMAP4) then you'll need to 
restore the mail server from a back up.

All this database integration by the KDE team has brought some catastrophic 
failures even to devs PCs and they have spared some of us from similar pain 
when they advised that we mask any kde-base/kmail >4.4.11.1-r1.  Bitrot is 
setting in though, so I am not sure how long it may take before I have to move 
on to a different mail client after the best part of 10 years using kmail.

-- 
Regards,
Mick