[gentoo-user] Kmail2 - I have not given up ... yet

[Mick]

I am thinking of migrating my laptop from Kmail1 to Kmail2.  I don't *really* 
have to do this yet, but I'd rather attempt one more time to move to Kmail2 
while not under duress, because bitrot or maintainers decisions may force my 
hand sooner or later anyway.

I have made half a dozen attempts over the years, most with very poor results.  
Thankfully I was not hit by the bug that deleted most of Alan's emails, at the 
early days of KDEPIM4.  However, my experiences can be summarised as follows:

1. Attempts to migrate my old emails to Kmail2 ended up never completing 
satisfactorily.  Duplicate emails, not syncing Sent messages, etc. were some 
of the symptoms.  I blamed the hardware at the time, which was a really 
anaemic old 32bit laptop.  At least one account (Gmail) was POP3 and I wanted 
to keep it this way.  It never really worked properly, duplicating messages 
and multiplying them every time I deleted one of the duplicate messages.  In a 
couple of days the installation was unusable.  I rinsed and repeated from 
backups, with the same unsatisfactory results.  I deleted all accounts and 
recreated them afresh (rather than migrating the existing messages on the 
disk) but this was plagued by the same problems.  Eventually I gave up and 
went back to Kmail1. 

2. A couple of years later, I had another go with Kmail2, but this time I 
decided to use IMAP4, on an Acer with a dual core chip and 4GB RAM.  
Thankfully, there were no dupes, no mail corruption, or loss.  I ended up 
blaming a poor implementation of POP3 or Gmail for previous problems.  
However, with my large number of messages, it would still take for ever to 
sync folders (Gmail labels).  Email accounts with less than 1,000 messages did 
not seem to have a problem syncing withing a reasonable time.  I had a couple 
of akonadi/mysql corruptions too.  On a laptop the concept of having to wait 
in excess of an hour for your Gmail Inbox to sync with the server is not a 
practical proposition.  However, leaving it overnight to sync everything 
usually would result in a working mail client.  I say usually, because 
occasionally mysql would peg one CPU core to 100% and kmail would freeze for 
anything up to 40 minutes at a time.  The whole interface would freeze 
whenever it was syncing a folder.

3. I set up Kmail2 on an old 32bit desktop for my wife.  Kmail2 was similarly 
unresponsive while syncing folders and while akonadi was doing its indexing on 
mysql.  I reverted it back to Kmail1.

4. I set up Kmail2 on a modern desktop (quad-core with 16GB RAM) for my wife's 
multiple email accounts, all with less than 1,000 messages.  Over the period 
of a year she experienced a couple of akonadi/mysql corruptions, from which 
her installation recovered fully, after I removed the akonadi databases and 
let it recreate them.  Kmail2 is being used daily without her reporting any 
other problems with it.


So I decided to delete a lot of old messages to slim my Gmail down and have 
another go with Kmail2.  However, I am still unsure from my experimentation if 
the intermittent nature of a network connection of a laptop will cause any 
problems with Kmail2 and its akonadi architecture.

Have you been able to use Kmail2 reliably on a *laptop*?  What problems have 
you experienced?  Has intermittent network availability caused loss of 
messages?  Any gotchas and workarounds?  Any suggestions?

-- 
Regards,
Mick