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

[Peter Humphrey]

On Friday 01 January 2016 11:47:16 Mick wrote:
> On Friday 01 Jan 2016 10:41:40 Peter Humphrey wrote:
> > On Friday 01 January 2016 10:26:05 Mick wrote:
> > > ... my kmail2 still seems to be functioning properly and without any
> > > major problems so far.  :-)
> >
> > What, not even duplicates? I'm still getting a dozen a day.
>
> Hi Peter,
>
> I think your problem with duplicates is specific to the Kmail2's POP3
> implementation.

That does seem likely, yes.

> I noticed this too in the early days of Kmail2, on an old
> PC which was having great trouble running akonadi.  POP3 messages were
> being duplicated back then and every time I deleted any duplicates they
> were magically being recreated afresh.  I never nailed it down to a
> particular cause, because the old PC could not run Kmail2 effectively for
> daily usage - it was being pegged at 100% of CPU most of the time,
> corrupting its akonadi driven mysql database as it was going along.  I
> tried half a dozen times to perform get it running successfully, but
> eventually gave up in frustration of the ever propagating duplicate
> messages.  IMAP4 was also not very reliable back then, messages in the
> Sent folder were not shown at all.  However, this was a problem with the
> IMAP4 server I was using at the time and needed some change in the
> default IMAP4 configuration of Kmail2 to fix it.  The current version of
> my IMAP4 servers seem to work fine with Kmail2.

My ISP doesn't offer IMAP, and in any case I'd rather have my e-mails under 
my own control.

> I can confirm at present I am not having any duplicate messages showing up
> with IMAP4 on 3 different PCs, with multiple email accounts, either with
> embedded mysql or on my most recent installation with a stand alone
> postgresql.  I can also confirm that on my  laptop even gkrellms is using
> more CPU (0.7%) than Kmail2 (0.3%), just as I am writing this email.  :-)

No great load here either. I'd be worried if there were, though.

> I recall from a previous thread that you tried different things to resolve
> the duplicate messages problem, including creating a new Kmail account
> and starting afresh.  I don't know how much basic troubleshooting you may
> have done.  On the client side, did you try running a new stand alone
> database (not embedded in akonadi) in case this is a database problem?
>
> Also, did you try a different POP3 mail account, from a different provider
> to check this is not server specific?
>
> Otherwise, it may be some error incurred during the 'message-number'
> exchange between your mailserver and the Kmail2 POP3 client, or how these
> message- numbers are stored/refreshed by akonadi.  You could try
> troubleshooting POP3 packet exchanges with the server using wireshark to
> see what flies on the wire, then doing some open heart surgery on the
> mysql tables to find out what is the matter with the 'message-number'
> stored/used by akonadi.  The aconadiconsole may be useful for this
> purpose, or good ol' mysql commands on a terminal.

Thanks for your thoughts Mick. I think most of my problems have persisted 
through many iterations from the early days of KMail-2. At any rate, I've 
just deleted the whole KMail structure once more and reimported from archive 
and so far I've no duplicates. I used to get duplicates in certain folders 
even from the import process.

I followed the instructions here, about two-thirds down the page:

https://userbase.kde.org/KMail/FAQs_Hints_and_Tips#Get_more_screen_space_in_KMail

Yes, really! I'd better submit a bug report to get that text moved to 
somewhere more suitable.

-- 
Rgds
Peter