I use KDEPIM 4.6 and Kmail doesn't send anything. Instead, mails just linger in the outbox. What I am used to from Thunderbird is that eMails get sent immediately, and it would be awesome if that could work.

Thank you from a frustrated kmail newbie!


This thread has the same topic, but it seems to be about 4.4, so I don't know if it is applicable. On those akonadi troubleshooting pages I didn't find anything related.

EDIT: According to my sent mail folder, I was still able to send mail just 2 days ago. Had forgotten to mention this.

What is the output of "ps aux | grep akonadi_maildispatcher"?

Thank you for your help!

Code: Select all

ps aux | grep akonadi_maildispatcher
alvanx    6657  0.0  0.9  86180 19464 ?        S    11:15   0:00 /usr/bin/akonadi_maildispatcher_agent --identifier akonadi_maildispatcher_agent
alvanx    8787  0.0  0.0   3704   812 pts/0    S+   11:30   0:00 grep akonadi_maildispatcher


I would also like to add that I have killed akonadi 3 or 4 times before I realized that this meant data-loss. I have had to re-import my emails from TB three times, and had to re-add my calendar once, all because akonadi is such an unbearable resource hog. Many times when I click the button to fetch new mail, everything will get really slow, and akonadiserver and akonadi_agent_l will start to hog up to over 1GB of memory - which is totally unacceptable given the simple task of downloading emails, and that it effectively freezes my entire system for probably over 5 min. I only have 2GB of memory, but that should be enough to run 10 instances of Thunderbird without glitches. The same sometimes happens when I exit out of kmail. Just thought this might be useful background information.

(And all because I trusted those developer blogs saying "Most people should be able to upgrade to KDEPIM 4.6 safely now". I really don't know why they said that. Oh well, I'm going to try to stick to it now, hoping 4.7 will make things better.)

That is quite unusual. If you use a program such as htop, can you diagnose which programs (and their arguments) are causing this high memory usage?

Can you please confirm also that you have setup an SMTP server, and nominated one as the default (should have been done for you, just need to make sure)

I don't use htop. I'd be glad to provide you with any output once provided with more information though. Let me see if I can get it figured out. If you don't hear back from me soon, I probably didn't.

Yes, I manually set up an SMTP server, and one is the default. I set smtp.googlemail.com, enabled authentification and had kmail auto-detect the rest of the settings. I have two other SMTP servers set up. This problem doesn't seem to be related. Also, sending used to still work on, like, Monday.

I'm very happy to hear that this is quite unusual. I was about to despair after I had invested so many hours into switching apps.

Ok, so I don't quite get the difference between htop and the KDE system monitor. You know the thing that you can invoke with Ctrl+Esc?

Anyways, if I understand you right, what I can tell you so far is that the two services that hogged all that memory were akonadiserver and akonadi_agent_l, as mentioned above. But I didn't think that's all you wanted to know.

Ok, if you hover over akonadi_agent_l, it's full name and arguments should show up. Looks like something is storing data into Akonadi...

install Akonadiconsole and run it from command line. See if the "mail dispatcher agent" is "offline" - if so try rightclicking on it and set to online. If that does not work remove the MDA and create a new one. I have had to do both since starting to use KMail2

Something really interesting happened to me about 3 days past. Kmail started sending messages again - out of nowhere. I don't have the foggiest idea of how this happened, but I'm happy it does. I held back on it for two days to see if this wasn't just a momentary phase. No I have time to answer.

Even though the sending problem is solved, I still have those memory peaks at times. I also notice that the simple act of selecting a folder the first time in a session sometimes takes up to 15s to load.

Here is more info about those peaks.
akonadi_agent_l is the bigger memory hog (sometimes over 800Mb) and has the following arguments (?) attached:
/usr/bin/akonadi_agent_launcher
akonadi_maildir_resource
akonadi_maildir_resource_5

akonadiserver takes up more CPU than memory in those times, it only lists "akonadiserver".

also mysqld uses up to 120Mb. It lists
/usr/sbin/mysqld --defaults-file=/home/alvanx/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/ --socket=/home/alvanx/.local/share/akonadi/socket-alvanx/mysql.socket

Upon starting Kmail, prepare_preload also takes up a lot of CPU - up to 50% - and seems to also make the program significantly slower. Argument: /usr/bin/perl -w /usr/bin/prepare_preload

Thanks for your help.

prepare_preload is a program shipped with openSUSE which runs a few minutes after startup to optimise the preloading of files used on startup. It usually quits after a couple of minutes once it has rebuilt the optimisation cache. It is intended to improve the speed of startup.

I would recommend checking to see if the maildir resource keeps crashing (through ~/.xsession-errors) or if you have two maildir resources looking at the same directory.

Doesn't seem to be the case. "maildir" appeared 3-4 times when I searched for it and only in connection with plug-ins loaded.

I find that with 4.6 it stops sending out mail at times.

To get it working again I have to use akonadiconsole to restart Mail Dispatcher Agent.

This might be valuable information for the next time this stops, but I can't find a package for akonadiconsole for openSUSE. Is this something distro specific?

Also, does anyone have any news about those memory leaks? I heard that KDEPIM 4.6 had some problems with this when it came out, so it would be interesting to hear which experiences other people have had. I still have that problem about once a day, but it seems to have relaxed a bit (still real annoying when a folder with 4k emails takes a minute (literally!) to load.).

orion2000za wrote:install Akonadiconsole and run it from command line. See if the "mail dispatcher agent" is "offline" - if so try rightclicking on it and set to online. If that does not work remove the MDA and create a new one. I have had to do both since starting to use KMail2

Just today I noticed Kmail wasn't sending via Gmail, and the Akonadiconsole tip worked. For some reason the mail dispatcher was offline. Switching it to online made my mail do its thing.