Re: [gentoo-user] Anyone succeeded with kmail2?

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thu, 03 Jan 2013 09:43 +0000
Peter Humphrey <peter@××××××××××××××.org> wrote:

> Hello list,
>
> When kmail was upgraded to 4.9.3 last month it made a complete hash
> of my e- mail system. In the end I moved my user out of the way and
> created a new user. Importing the e-mails from a backup of the old
> version omitted large numbers of e-mails, including a lot of complete
> folders. I also noticed that kmail had not created a trash folder.

So the kdepim devs STILL haven't fixed that one? Oh dear.

tldr; longish post. Short version: Use something else. It's mail, not
software magic.

I ran into something much the same long ago with kamil2
around the 4.3 or 4.5 era. Imports wouldn't work, akonadi was displaying
essentially random mails in random folders in no special order, and I
was losing mail.

Eventually, after much physical and spiritual pain, I figured that what
was really happening was probably akonadi importing the mail to
$SOMEWHERE and $AT_SOME_RANDOM_TIME would index it properly; it would
do this on the basis off $WHEN_IT_FELT_RIGHT_TO_DO_IT.

This trick works awesomely well for caching thumbnails of my video
collection for xbmc. It works less well for my mail. It's disastrous
when the whole process is not documented, when the user has no
visibility into it and no defined way of seeing what's going on, not
even a progress meter. The traditional way of handling such
asynchronous indexing problems is to provide an option where the user
can force a re-index and the system will just chug along doing it
displaying progress. If the mail app suspends itself while doing this,
well that's fine, at least it ends in a reasonable time. But, kdepim at
that stage had no such option.

One other thing I discovered back then: if I killed akonadi & kdepim
and rebooted out of sheer frustration, it would *throw* *away* all it's
temporary files form $SOMEWHERE as above and corrupt it's own database.
Leading to lost mail. If you just leave the damn thing alone for ages
and ages it eventually sorts itself out, but you can't see how far
along it is.

Such shoddy alpha-quality software shipped and billed as enterprise
production-ready was more than I could bear, so I just switched mail
client to claws-mail.

On 4.9.3 you are still experiencing something similar. Hmmm. Indicates
to me a high probability of a systemic problem with the projects
approach, something that is unlikely to ever get really fixed. In my
opinion kdepim2 is vastly over-engineered and an attempt to solve a
problem that does not actually exist. I recommend you use a different
mail app.

As I mentioned in the tldr, it's a mail app. There are many mail apps
and none are super-special. 




>
> So I did it again: created another new user. This time I got more
> messages imported but still not the whole lot (about 25,000). Still
> no trash. So I imported specific folders to complete the import. I
> tried creating a Wastebin folder manually (that's what the trash can
> is called in the UK) but of course that had no effect.
>
> Now I find that several filters work sometimes but not others, thus
> dropping e.g. this list partly into its own folder and partly into
> the general inbox. If I move the offending messages myself, next time
> I look they've been moved back again.
>
> If I delete a message, there being no trash folder, it's re-presented
> as a new message together with the original, and if I delete those I
> get four. Now in one folder I have 120 "new" messages.
>
> Is there a sane way out of this? I don't know if I can face creating
> yet another new user with all the drudgery that entails.
>



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@×××××.com