I am moving to a new email provider and am planning on changing the way I access my email on my desktop at the same time. My plan is to use the latest Kmail (4.8.3 as of writing) together with OfflineIMAP. I'd like to add the OfflineIMAP layer so that I have a maildir directory available for when I use ssh to log into my machine and want to read my messages using a console MUA such as mutt.

My question is about how akonadi handles local maildirs. Does it make a copy of each message and place it in the akonadi back end? I do not want to have two copies of each message stored locally. If akonadi simply stores the location and some meta data then this would be acceptable.

I suspect that I will have some more questions, but this is the one that I have been most curious about. If anyone wishes to share any experiences with doing something like I am hoping to do, I'd also appreciate that.

Thanks.

For local Maildir structures, Akonadi should only store a copy of metadata information. Nepomuk will index it, which will create a small amount of duplication needed for it to maintain it's index.

bcooksley wrote:For local Maildir structures, Akonadi should only store a copy of metadata information. Nepomuk will index it, which will create a small amount of duplication needed for it to maintain it's index.

Thanks for the reply. So I can avoid any major duplication of data by simply turning off indexing?

If you need to disable indexing, then you can disable it by removing the Nepomuk agents using "akonadiconsole".

If you run 4.8 or newer, it's easier: untick "Enable email indexing" in the Desktop Search control panel, in System Settings.