Last week I did a fresh installation/upgrade of my operating system, moving from KDE 4.8.x to KDE 4.9.4. Before I wiped my hard-drive, I backed up my entire /home partition, expecting to simply restore all the files after the new OS installation. Apart from a few niggles with the desktop configuration, everything else restored as if nothing had changed... except Kontact/kmail!

Originally kmail refused to open, citing several errors (sorry can't remember exactly what these were) that boiled down to my emails not being "seen" by kmail. I realised this might be a problem with Akonadi's database, but cannot work out what (apologies - I only use the software, but do not understand how it necessarily works).

I then deleted the some of restored files relating to kmail, which has allowed me to open kmail and start receiving new emails (I use a POP3 account), but cannot work out how to get my old emails from kmail4.8 to be recognised. There is no import function that relates to kmail2! My old emails are safe in my backup, but I'm not sure exactly where they live or how to transfer them successfully into the right folders so kmail can recognise them. I've tried fiddling and moving various files, but nothing works. As a guess, it seems that the old emails seem linked to the old operating system, and the new one ignores them.

I must be doing something wrong - surely there is an easy way to import my old kmail2 emails? After all, it's practically the same software. Migrating from kmail1 seemed easier than this. kmail2 it just baffles me!

If you have mails in Maildir/mbox format you can just import them with the KMail importer (File->Import). That should be enough.

Thanks einar!

Can't believe I missed that option. I was trying to use the Tools>Import Wizard which only seemed to suggest alternative mail clients, but not the world's greatest.

Emails now succesfully imported. Much appreciated