Hello,
I am new to kontact and must say I like it a lot.

As the title suggests I am using kmail on three installations on the same machine and would like to use the same mail folder on a separate partition (/Data) instead of the default/home/.kde/share......

I can do this with contact and kalander but cannot find a way of doing this in kmail.

I used to use thunderbird and there I can designate the folder I want my mail to go to.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated and I apologize if the answer is hidden somewhere I have not found yet.

The mail will be placed in $KDEHOME/share/apps/kmail/
As long as you do not simulataneously use it, or with differing versions of KMail you should be fine.

Thank you for the quick response

bcooksley wrote:The mail will be placed in $KDEHOME/share/apps/kmail/
As long as you do not simulataneously use it, or with differing versions of KMail you should be fine.

I realize that but I have various linuxes installed and various different /home/usernames

I would like to centralize the "mailbox" on something I like /Data/Fintan/mail/kmail so I have all my mail in one place.

For example my contacts are all here:

/Data/Fintan/Adressbook/Addresses2008/addressbook.vcf

You will be able to do that by closing KMail, moving that folder to the location desired then Symlinking it.
This command will need to be executed under each user you wish to use it under.

Code: Select all

ln -s /path/to/kmail/settings $KDEHOME/share/apps/kmail

I am new to the KDE forum and I am impressed with what I see. Thanks.

This thread addresses almost exactly the question I have. In the past, using Thunderbird, I have done something similar to Fintan's setup by doing what bcooksley advised except that I put my mail on a flash drive that I could carry between three different computers that I use. A year and a half ago I used Kontact for a few months. I really liked it, but I could never achieve the flash drive portability. I would like to return to Kontact for many reasons and have recently found some articles that suggest that my problem was that I was using a Fat16 formatted flash drive. My question: With an ext3 format can I in fact do this with a flash drive and Kmail? Do the mail accounts have to be set up separately on each machine or do they reside in the kmail folder? Can the rest of Kontact be done the same way so I can take not only my mail, but also contacts, calendar, todo list, notes, weather locations, and rss feeds with me? What folders need to be linked?

Thanks so much for your help.

to share email settings and kmail behaviour you may also want to symlink ~/.kde/share/config/kmailrc

toad wrote:to share email settings and kmail behaviour you may also want to symlink ~/.kde/share/config/kmailrc

Thanks for your help. I started another another thread because i had some more related, but different questions.

Sorry for the delay, busy with other stuff.

I have never symlinked before so bear with me.
Did this:
fintan3@fintanws2:~$ ln -s /Data/Fintan/Mail/kmail/ $KDEHOME/share/apps/kmail
ln: Erzeuge symbolische Verknüpfung „/share/apps/kmail“: No such file or directory
fintan3@fintanws2:~$

Then this for linux1

fintan1@fintanws2:~$ ln -s /Data/Fintan/Mail/kmail/ /home/fintan3/.kde/share/apps/kmail
ln: Erzeuge symbolische Verknüpfung „/home/fintan3/.kde/share/apps/kmail/kmail“: File exists
fintan1@fintanws2:~$

and this for linux2:

fintan2@fintanws2:~$ ln -s /Data/Fintan/Mail/kmail/ /home/fintan3/.kde/share/apps/kmail
ln: Erzeuge symbolische Verknüpfung „/home/fintan3/.kde/share/apps/kmail/kmail“: File exists
fintan2@fintanws2:~$

I sent a test mail from gmail which showed up on linux1 but not on linux2 (automatic get message deactivated on both)

Should that message not show up on both?

What am I missing??

Edit: Linux1 is Kubutnu 8.10 and Linux 2 is 9.04 alpha5. Could this be the problem?

1. first delete target folders, i.e. linux1(2) ~/.kde(4)/share/apps/kmail and ~/.kde(4)/share/config/kmailrc
2. now link data file to target, i.e. ln -s /Data/Fintan/Mail/kmail/ ~/kde(4)/share/apps/ - note that there is no kmail folder for the target
3. ditto for kmailrc

Or just drag and drop in konqueror/dolphin

Does that help?

Hey toad, good to see a familiar face:) (kubuntu forum) and thanks your the quick lesson in symlinking.

It worked fine. I renamed ~..kmail to kmailOld instead of deleting.

Not sure about doing:
kmailrc
kontact for 8.10 and 0.04 are slightly different in their looks.

Yep, greetings Fintan

Glad it worked. Not sure about kmailrc with kde3 & kde4 either. And I cannot check, so on your own head be it (or not as the case may be).