Hi,

I was reading this topic:
viewtopic.php?f=215&t=101653
where someone told to use akonadiconsole. I did something there, as now I have only few Todays email in MAIN folder - ALL older are missing. Is there any chance to recover those emails?

I think on Akonadi Neopmuk Feeder I clicked restart agent and something similair on Mail Filter Agent.
and I think on was of those I clicked configure natively.

If you restart Akonadi, does anything change?
How is your email stored?

Hi, in http://blogs.kde.org/node/4503 amantia asured the e-mail data are still under ~/.local/share/.local-mail.directory. My e-mails are not there. With grep I found some parts of them in the akonadi db. So to recover/rescue them the access to this akonadi db is needed. Unfortunately I cannot leave Kmail for a longer time running because it copies it's data without any sense, so that the number of so called e-mails increases steadily. To access the db I tried some standard tools like mysql and phpMyAdmin applying them by the nonstandard akonadi socket:

~/.local/share/akonadi/socket-<hostname>/mysql.socket

I get an mysql error 2002: cannot connect to the database, possibly socket configured in the wrong way. Could somebody help me, please.
Btw: do your programs effectively delete e-mails for some possibly administrative purposes ? I mean - is there any hope to recover them if I didn't delete anything on my own ?

Thanx in adv.
Zbyszek

It would be very unusual if they are not there. Please check the settings of "Local Folders" (and any other folder structures) using "akonadiconsole" to verify the paths are correct.

In terms of accessing the Akonadi database, running the following worked for me without trouble.

Code: Select all

mysql --socket=/home/ben/.local/share/akonadi/socket-bianca.eclipse.lan/mysql.socket

I am new to this forum and like to say hello to everybody!

I am using Kmail under Kubuntu 12.04, which I installed as a clean setup, coming from Kubunto 10.04. I was forced to migrate all my emails - folder-by-folder - from Kmail's old mbox to new Kmail2's maildir format. It was a lot of work, but Kmail2 worked for me, eventhough being much less stable than previous kmail versions (when opening emails with external sources, or when deleting emails, kmal2 often crashes, but no loss of emails in the Kmail surface yet).

Yesterday gave me a very hard time.
I experienced the search function in Kmail2 could not find some older email (prior to os installation date) in spite of I could find the email by manual search. I tried to find out why the search function (strangely connected to aconadi, strigi and such stuff) just finds newer emails. By that investigation, I found all my "old" emails have been removed from the maildir folders under /home/username/.local/share/local-mail/ where I imported them to. Can you imagine how much I was shocked, finding out almost all my emails have gone?

After some more searching, I found out the files are moved into the folder
/home/username/.local/share/aconadi/file_db_data/ but all are put into one single directory. No way to identify "physically" to which folder they belong!

It seems I have lost control over my email files and kmail2/aconadi took over the control. I cannot accept losing my files from where I stored them!
I am very afraid, it cannot be possible to migrate such "out-of-control" files from current os to another pc.

Searching long time in the internet, I could not find any solution to get back full control over my files. Since this very much unsettled me, I decided to give up Kmail for now and it took me a long time again to re-install Kmails old mbox directories from my backup, then to archive all new emails, convert to mbox again and setup Thunderbird, to handle my emails, using mbox format again. I feel more safe, since Thunderbird does not remove the stored files. I understand the data is less safe in Thunderbird since it is mbox format.
But I do not like Thunderbird as much as I liked Kmail! I want "my" Kmail back!

Will there be a solution in the future to avoid "losing" the files from their original folders?

I think it must not be allowed to move any files without the user's will!
All other systems like music databases just collect informations about the music files in a database, keeping the music files in place!!! Why does Kmal2/aconadi move my files? I am deeply frightened by this unwanted solution and I hope this shall not become the future for more KDE programs!

My thinking is: user files must be kept untouched in the user's property.
Why do the KDE developers think different about that?

Sorry for long post - still under shock.

Hope on comments.
regards
Hanseat

Those in file_data are not the actual mails. You will find them at /home/username/.local/share/.local-mail-directory/. And about finding only newer emails: the email indexer has likely not finished indexing them all, that is why you see the newer ones first.

Thanks for your post.

Lets see whether I understand right, what you mean. Since the indexer (akonadi) has not finished the indexing procedure, that is the reason why lots of the emails are not present in the local-mail subdirectories. Is that what you mean?

But does this mean for indexing, the emails are all removed by the indexer and shifted into the dedicated Akonadi directory and then- after indexing is finished - shifted back to their original local-mail directory? Is that right?
Is it not a dangerous solution to move files instead of reading them, just for indexing?

Now its three days (apprx. 30 hours of PC activity) after the last time when I used Kmail. Kmail is still off, while Akonadi is always up and working. Should the indexer not have had enough time to do the indexing? In the Akonadi directory, right now I do find apprx. 6700 files, all of these files are dated mid of June (I guess thats the date when they were copied from local-mail to akonadi directory?) originated from various local-mail directories. When shall they come back to their original local-mail directories? During the time when I wrote this post, the quantity did not change, not even for one file. I shall watch this from now on.

Guess, once I need to move my data onto a new PC: how to ensure no emails get lost? Thats my major concern.

If Akonadi got stuck during indexing procedure (I am afraid that's the case here), how to get back the emails, back to their original folders?

What to do?

Akonadi is not an indexer: it uses another bit of KDE to do the indexing.

Also, it does not move mail, did you check if they are in that path I mentioned earlier? Akonadi merely caches things, it does not alter the original mails (if it does, it's a bug, and should be fixed).

And to answer your question on backup/restore: 4.9 should come with a backup/restore utility: see http://www.aegiap.eu/kdeblog/2012/07/ne ... ackupmail/ for more information.

Let me explain again:
After fresh standard installation of Kubuntu 12.04 including Kmail2, I imported my Kmail1 emails from external harddisk, using the Kmail2 import function for import from mbox files.

The imported files, using Kmail2, I have then copied into the desired directory structure within Kmail2.

Since I was not suspicious against Kmail2, I believed the files must exist in the desired directories which can be found under /home/username/.local/share/local-mail/...

As I explained before, after I experienced a poor search function result, I found out I can see all my 15000 emails within Kmail2, but I can find apprx. 8000 files as expected under /home/username/.local/share/local-mail/... but 7000 files are missing under that path. I found them under /home/username/.local/share/akonadi/file_db_data/
The search function just searches in the emails stored under local-mail path but ignores the emails which Kmail2 has stored under the akonadi path.

Still there are 7000 files under the akonadi path, no action of these files is visible, all seems static.
All these files have a naming like "2342_r0" cunting up in 2 or 3 steps, highest file name is "91111_r0". Dolphin's file info shows which email is in the highlighted file. The file's date is the date when I imported the files.

But I think having these many files in the akonadi path seems not good to me. At least it is not good for the search function!
That is what makes me mad with Kmail2.

Do you have any idea why the 7000 files have been moved from local-mail to akonadi path, while 8000 other emails are still under the local-mail path?

Does anybody know how to move back the files to their normal places under .../local-mail/?

One more Question: after moving a email directory within Kmail2, when viewing the email, Kmail2 indicates "the folder is not valid". But no other visible problem occurs by the not valid folder. Why?

Is this issue in conjunction with the emails stored under akonadi path?
Actually, I could not find out clearly yet.

For the missing emails, which I found as files in akonadi path, I finally found a slow but working solution:

The Kmail2 subdirectories which show a difference in the number of emails when compared to the number of files in the related local-mail subdirectory, I have copied subdirectory by subdirectory, each into a newly created subdirectory by using Kmail2.

By the Dolphin file manager I could watch the growing number of files in the related sub directories.

I took a lot of care to avoid "invallid directories" which seem to depend on too high system load while creating subdirectories (another issue of Kmail2 I never experienced in Kmail1).

After copying one directory, these files finally do appear in the local-mail path and there is also a copy in the akonadi path. The latter ones are found to be automatically erased after indexing is finished.

I always waited for each subdirectory's indexing. Nepomukstorage and virtuoso-t together cause 100 percent system load during indexing. Each email takes apprx. 2-3 seconds for indexing, each causing up to 100 percent cpu load for a moment (load drops back to less than 10percent after indexing the emails).

After a Kmail2 subdirectory contents were copied into a new directory and indexing finished, I could erase the original subdirectory by Kmail2. Doing that, the old existing (residual) files in the akonadi path are also getting erased! Glad to see that!

The trick is to COPY the malfunction subdirectory contents! Shifting the contents just moved the empty folder contents into the new folder. Only when copying, all the emails were re-created as new files in the local-mail path. by this way, I have spent one day to recover all the missing emails that were previously eaten but not swallowed by akonadi, nepomuk, vituoso-t or whatever.

Of course, I am still suspicious whether such kind of problem could occur again? But under normal conditions, I do not import thousands of emails except when doing a fresh install of the system.
I had to learn how slow the indexing is and we must not overstress it! That seems to be a critical point.

Hope the heavy system built from Kmail2, Akonadi, Nepomuk and Vituoso-t can be tuned to work more smooth and less demanding in the near future!

By the way, I found out, if the files are really existing in the maildir directory, its very easy to migrate them to another PC. This brings me back to use Kmail2 again! Thunderbird does not feel to me to be a full replacement for Kmail. Migration to Thunderbird loses email markings, thats not good at all.

Kmail2 remaining problems:
1. Still, Kmail2 tends to crash when opening HTML-emails with contents to be loaded from external source, e.g. the GMX daily news email

2. In Kmail2, (new) sent emails do not show the "attachment" marking if there is a attachment in the sent email - why?
Received emails show the attachment marking as expected.
Old sent emails (sent by Kmail1) also have the attachment marking shown.
Therefore I guess the attachment marking is missing by error in Kmail2.

Greetings
Hanseat