Hi all, I'm new to these forums with questions about apparantly undocumented features/settings in KMail, and hope someone can help out.

I'm using KDE 4.12 and want to use KMail to access my gmail account, containing ca 70,000 mails. It basically works, but is quite slow, and every now and then tells me it lost the connection to the server. So I started looking into ways of speeding things up. My questions are as follows:

* What is the relation of "offline mode" vs "local subscription"? My guess was that with "offline mode" enabled, KMail keeps a local copy of all mails (which I want). Somewhere I read "local subscription" would mean a groupware functionality, so that for example marking a mail as read locally does not mark it as read on the IMAP server (which I don't want). However, if I switch these local subscriptions off, the corresponding folders disappear from my folder list, so apparently it is something else.

* What does "server side subscription" mean in comparison to "local subscription" (in comparison to "offline mode")? Is this documented somewhere? Which settings are you using?

* Ideally, I would like to set up KMail in such a way that it checks for changes only in the inbox of my gmail account on startup, and in all other folders only after I move/edit mail there, or change into that folder. Is that possible?

* Do also other users experience speed problems with KMail and gmail accounts? Is the problem that gmail is not perfectly supported (loosing connection to the server..) or is it the large number of emails? Are there known ways on how to improve the situation?

Steve

stevejacke wrote:Hi all, I'm new to these forums with questions about apparantly undocumented features/settings in KMail, and hope someone can help out.

Hello and welcome!

I'm using KDE 4.12 and want to use KMail to access my gmail account, containing ca 70,000 mails. It basically works, but is quite slow, and every now and then tells me it lost the connection to the server. So I started looking into ways of speeding things up.

My current email account (although not on GMail) has about 54,000 messages, and it's quite snappy. So I'm fairly sure we can at least alleviate your issues with some configuration.

* What is the relation of "offline mode" vs "local subscription"? My guess was that with "offline mode" enabled, KMail keeps a local copy of all mails (which I want).

What you want is not "offline mode", which just tells KMail that there is no network connectivity, but "disconnected mode". You can enable it in the account properties, in the Advanced tab.

Somewhere I read "local subscription" would mean a groupware functionality, so that for example marking a mail as read locally does not mark it as read on the IMAP server (which I don't want). However, if I switch these local subscriptions off, the corresponding folders disappear from my folder list, so apparently it is something else.

Subscriptions are a specific IMAP feature that allows you to watch or exclude particular folders from your hierarchy. Local vs server means that it is your client that does the selection of folders to display, or the IMAP server itself (the distinction is due to the fact that not all IMAP servers support this feature - GMail does, btw). So don't disable folders that you want to keep watch on.

* Ideally, I would like to set up KMail in such a way that it checks for changes only in the inbox of my gmail account on startup, and in all other folders only after I move/edit mail there, or change into that folder. Is that possible?

What you can do is to disable new mail notification for folders you don't want. In Configure KMail > Miscellaneous > Agent settings check the "New mail notifier agent" then click on Configure. You will be able to tick / untick folders where KMail will tell you about new mail (it will still be downloaded, though).

* Do also other users experience speed problems with KMail and gmail accounts? Is the problem that gmail is not perfectly supported (loosing connection to the server..) or is it the large number of emails? Are there known ways on how to improve the situation?

First of all see if with the suggestions implemented here the situation improves: post your results here and if there aren't improvements we'll see how we can diagnose the problem.

einar wrote:What you want is not "offline mode", which just tells KMail that there is no network connectivity, but "disconnected mode". You can enable it in the account properties, in the Advanced tab.

Ok, thanks for the explanation of disconnected/local/server subscriptios - I was guessing the English description here.

What you can do is to disable new mail notification for folders you don't want. In Configure KMail > Miscellaneous > Agent settings check the "New mail notifier agent" then click on Configure. You will be able to tick / untick folders where KMail will tell you about new mail (it will still be downloaded, though).

I now did that for the spam folder, which is useful already as I don't want to be informed about new spam

First of all see if with the suggestions implemented here the situation improves: post your results here and if there aren't improvements we'll see how we can diagnose the problem.

There is a gmail specific thing I saw in this context: gmail organizes mail by tags, which then is translated into a folder structure, including a folder "all messages". This one contains -quite redundantly from the folder perspective - all messages, i.e. every mail is downloaded twice. Unchecking it (server side in my case) reduces your mail to 50%, so I am only facing 35,000 mail after all.

Still, checking for mail is very slow. By very slow I mean it takes something from several seconds to minutes to check a single folder, and the checking of all folders in my gmail account takes forever, maybe half an hour or an hour, I didn't bother to check that in detail as it is way too slow. The nepomuk feeder is done with its initial crawl by the way, so that's not the culprit here. It's also not my network connection as thunderbird checks this accounts in a very quick and responsive manner.

As you say your large IMAP account is quick on kmail, I figure this is gmail related? Are there maybe other people who can report on their experience of the kmail/gmail combination? Or are there some other settings I could try to improve the situation?

Many thanks already,
Steve

Let's assess some details on your system:

- Open System Settings > Desktop Search; Is email indexing enabled? Also, is there a status text saying if it's indexing?
- Do you experience the same slowness with local folders?

With regards to the redundant download of mail, a KDE PIM developer said he had plans to write a specific extension that would support the additional flags used over IMAP by GMail, however nothing has been written yet so it will likely take some time (and it's stuff that will only appear in later PIM versions).

I'm going to chime in here with a similar experience though not with gmail. I run an imap server on my main workstation, allowing me to archive email no matter from what computer I'm doing that. Those archives live under ~/Mail/Archives, and an imap client not ignoring everything above that path will spend a very long time indexing ~ .
I've skimmed through a few discussions on kmail's approach to the "imap prefix path" most email readers support, and while I tend to agree that if namespaces are the standards compliant way to do things they should be used, I also think the implementation isn't without flaws ... if it even implements namespaces at all.
Let's ignore the fact that the current imap configuration dialog doesn't even mention namespaces (presumably replaced by server-side subscriptions?). The real gripe I have is that I apparently have to let the imap process index the full server-side contents before I can point it to the appropriate root folder (Mail/Archives). And it's not just an omission in the GUI: I tried simulating the required actions with a small imap account, and observed that apparently all mailboxes (folders) under the root are listed explicitly, rather than only the root folder. Which in my book is not using a namespace as any addition (new folder) will have to be added manually to the selection (requiring another lengthy indexing step).

I'd suggest reinstating a simple "prefix path" feature that can be specified (= typed in) even before the first connection to a new imap account. It's only a single text entry field, and internally it could perfectly well be translated into the appropriate namespace magic.

(BTW, now that I've got sending to work, kmail actually works better than Apple's Mail.app IMHO, and I'm very likely to replace the latter with the former.)

There's some work on handling folders that may or may not fit your use case: it's being done with 4.14 in mind.
See http://cmollekopf.wordpress.com/2014/05 ... on-system/ for more details.

Regarding namespaces and all, IIRC the IMAP resource strives to be RFC compliant.

But how/where does one find the namespaces functionality?

I tried to import the settings for my local imap server from a Thunderbird config (which shows the server's namespaces AND allows to specify a path prefix), but that information was clearly dropped by the import wizard. I let the resource run for about 2h, and finally had to kill and delete it without even having been able to select my Mail/Archives folder from the list.

This is clearly a bug in my opinion, and I'll report it as such.