I'm planing to move my eMails (about 40.000 received and 10.000 sent, 1,5 GB) from Opera (exported to *.mbs). I suppose there is no importing issue but how to organize the eMail? I mainly use POP3.

In Opera there was one Inbox and a lot of automatic filters (eMail-Addressbook, Conversations, eMail-Account) but in KMaile the filters only work for copying or moving the messages. So I wounder if I could leave the messages in the Inbox and use only the full-text search. Will there be a problem with > 1,5 GB and > 50.000 messages in the Inbox?

I think it could be a good idea to separate the old messages (from Opera) from the new ones. So KMail seems to save the POP3-messages in a "Local Folder" (for me ~/.local/share/local-mail) and I wonder to create another local folder just to store the old messages. Does this work and how? Can I set the new local folder to read-only? It looks like I can search both local Folders at the same time, am I right?

Any other suggestions for a KMail-beginner?

You can search both folders, in fact you can decide which folders to look into when you search. As for the size, I'm not sure: I use IMAP (disconnected, so I have mails on my machine as well) and I have some folders up to 30,000 messages. Performance is OK, but as usual, YMMV.

Indexing may require a bit, though (depending on your version of KDE PIM, it may be slower or faster, generally the higher the version number - currently 4.10.4 - the better in terms of speed for indexing).

You may want to try and export stuff from Opera in Maildir format if it's possible so that's very easy to point KMail to it (no import required if so).

Thanks for your help!

einar wrote:Indexing may require a bit, though (depending on your version of KDE PIM, it may be slower or faster, generally the higher the version number - currently 4.10.4 - the better in terms of speed for indexing).

But the indexing starts automatically?

einar wrote:You may want to try and export stuff from Opera in Maildir format if it's possible so that's very easy to point KMail to it (no import required if so).

*grrr* I made the emergency export in mbox format but I will try it again.

But what about the second inbox? Must I create the folder first or during the import process? Can I make the old-eMails-folder read only via KMail or only with the linux folder-properties?

wired2051 wrote:But the indexing starts automatically?

IIRC, it's enabled by default. You can check it by going to System Settings -> Desktop Search and check if "Enable mail indexing" is checked.

But what about the second inbox? Must I create the folder first or during the import process? Can I make the old-eMails-folder read only via KMail or only with the linux folder-properties?

I haven't used imports in a while, so I'm not sure. The best is to make a backup of the export from Opera Mail (so that you have starting data in pristine form) and try importing it with KMail (File-> Import).

It's better to delete mails from KMail once you have imported them as it keeps a reference to them internally, which gets updated when mails are added or deleted.

Until now I kept the messages on the server when I read them via POP3. But apart from this I want to make a backup of the KMail-messages before importing the old ones from Opera. But where are they stored? ~/.local/share/local-mail and ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/ and ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail2/ have only empty folders. Am I blind?

einar wrote:It's better to delete mails from KMail once you have imported them as it keeps a reference to them internally, which gets updated when mails are added or deleted.

Sorry but what did you mean by that? I don't understand.

Check ~/.local/share/.local-mail.directory or similar folders. Unfortunately it is a quirk of the specific Maildir implementation used by KMail.

I found ~/.local/share/local-mail/ and there are also only the empty folders tmp, new and cur. There are no hidden folders.

Check if there's a folder with the same name, but with ".directory" (and hidden).

Shame on me! Your suspicion were absolutely right. There is a folder ~/.local/share/.local-mail.directory/ and there are the messages.

I supposed if I tell Dolphin to show the hidden files, it works while I'm surfing but I have to tell it for each directory. Krusader works different. My fault.

Thanks a lot for your patience.