Because assignment of custom local folders to identities broke in my kmail-4.4.11.1 setup, I worked up my courage to upgrade to kmail-4.9.3.

I already tried this upgrade to kmail2 about 1 year ago, but akonadi did not succeed in importing my e-mails. Back then akonadi and strigi ate up all of my cpu making my system unresponsive. So I switched back to the former kmail version.

Some background information:

• Code: Select all

  uname -a
Linux lars-laptop 3.5.7-gentoo #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Nov 15 23:38:34 CET 2012 x86_64 Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7250 @ 2.00GHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux

• 4GB RAM
• system disk is an SSD
• tmp directories are in RAM:

  Code: Select all

  mount
...
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
tmpfs on /var/tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
...

• kmail is configured to manage 5 accounts, i.e. 5 identities with their own send/receive configurations and directory structures
• Local Folders contain about 10k to 20k mails

I learnt from my last attempt to upgrade and started with an empty ~/.kde4 directory. I also moved away ~/.local/share/akonadi.

So I actually started from scratch. First of all I created my 5 accounts. Btw. in kmail this means:

• creating a directory structure for each pop3 account
• creating transports for each account and assigning the INBOXes just created
• creating identities for each account and assigning the created sent-mail, drafts, templates directories
• modify the properties for each and every single (sub)directory created to assign the corresponding identity to chose as default when creating a new mail
• and finally configure all account specific settings (signatures, fetch-policies, ...

This is really a painful procedure, but since it has to be done only once I can live with it.

Next I used KMailCVT to import my old messages from the old ~/.kde4.121211/share/apps/kmail/mail/ directory. It took a while, but it finally worked.

Then I moved all mails to the the corresponding directories in the newly created directory structure. It took a while, but it finally worked.

Here is a list of problems so far:

• I am affected by bug 277007. You can imaging that handling several thousands of e-mails without full search is impossible.
• I also have been affected by 100% memory usage by virtuoso, which I could solve by temporarily increasing the maximum amount of main memory Nepomuk may use.
• There is another strange issue. When configuring my transport settings some test mails failed. These mails are still in my outbox and magically reappear when I delete them.
• I had set up my pop3 account to leave messages of the last 90 days on the server, so I can view them via imap or web interface from other devices. Now I downloaded all accounts and - I anticipated this - all mails of the last 90 days were downloaded again. So I changed the view of the message list to sort by unread mails and deleted all duplicates. By accident I deleted some mails here that were no duplicates so I wanted to restore them from my backup.
  
  I started KMailCVT to import my old mails again and now it hangs reproducible after importing 54% of those old mails. Aborting the import is only possible by stopping akonadi

  Code: Select all

  akonadictl stop

  and closing kmail. When I start kmail again it hangs - and it still does while I am writing this.

  Code: Select all

  "/usr/bin/kmail(6005)" Soprano: "Could not connect to server at /tmp/ksocket-lars/nepomuk-socket (No such file or directory)"
"/usr/bin/kmail(6005)" Soprano: "Unsupported operation (2)": "Invalid model"
"/usr/bin/kmail(6005)" Soprano: "Unsupported operation (2)": "Invalid model"
"/usr/bin/kmail(6005)" Soprano: "Invalid iterator."


It was in 2007 when I switched from Thunderbird to Kmail. Back then I was really excited about all those features kmail offered and thunderbird was lacking.

I have been using kmail for private and business mails (that's the reason I have 5 accounts/"identities" configured).

But now kmail is useless to me and I am forced to switch to another e-mail client.

The last errors are meaning that actually Nepomuk is not running (or it's not properly working). Did you try disabling email full text indexing prior to importing?

On my initial import - the successful one - Nepomuk was enabled.
On my second import - the first that failed - I disabled Nepomuk as soon as I recognized the import was not proceeding any more (after waiting for >30min). But this did not help.
I aborted this import and deleted all imported mails.
On my third import Nepomuk was not running.

Now Nepomuk is running again (only the Email Indexer is active).


At the moment when kmail is started, all selected folders shows a never-ending "sand-glass" icon. When I click on a mail I only get:

"Retrieving Folder Contents

Please wait..."

And this doesn't change - I waited for hours.

ok, good news:

• I deleted all imported Mails, i.e. the KMail-Import Folder.
• I rebooted my machine to ensure that all services/daemons are restarted (like in old Windows days )
• I did the import again with success! All mails from Mo. (when I made the backup) till 2006 (seems like I started using kmail in July 2006) are now under "KMail-Import" again.

bad news:
Remember: I already did the import and then moved all imported mails to their corresponding directories. Those are all gone. Seems like kmail forgot about all mails I imported.
In 2 account at least kmail kept the mails that arrived since Monday, in one account it deleted (or forgot?) all. In one account it even deleted the newly created folders "sent-mail", "drafts", "templates"!?

I am really scared now!

Can you check whether the local folders point to existing directories? I think you can see that in the accounts dialog.

einar wrote:Can you check whether the local folders point to existing directories? I think you can see that in the accounts dialog.

I checked "Settings" -> "Configure KMail..." -> "Zugänge" (Accounts in English? Yes, language settings are inconsistent, too) -> "Local Folders" -> "Modify..."

It is set to /home/lars/.local/share/local-mail and this directory exists. In there are the mails fetched since the upgrade, but no imported Mails although they showed up after the import in KMail and I moved them into the corresponding local folders.

But for me this issue is solved. I like console applications and so I switched to Mutt ("The e-mail client that sucks less").

Seems like I am not the only one that suffers from the directions KMail (and KDE as a whole) is moving.