I'm pondering whether to replace Thunderbird with KMail. I'm most used to Thunderbird, so I'd prefer staying with it really. On the other side, KMail offers better KDE integration as well as a few extra features and abilities, and also seems to be all right. I use TB for years to access my Yahoo! and Google mail accounts via IMAP and SMTP, and I like that by default it clones all of my remote folders (Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Trash, etc) into local folders... in mbox format while an experimental setting allows for maildir as well.

If I setup an IMAP account with the KMail account wizard however, I don't get this behavior. KMail doesn't appear to clone my remote folders locally. As confirmation, asking KMail to clone / sync / get everything then putting it in "offline mode" and afterward clicking a very old email asks me to go online again, meaning that my inbox wasn't cloned locally too. In Thunderbird this isn't the case, and I can clearly confirm that everything in my mail account is stored locally too. Apparently KMail only persists the header / body of each message for some time, nothing more.

Is it possible to configure Kmail and / or Akonadi to not use IMAP as a remote folder, but instead keep it in sync with a local maildir that I can actually work with? Preferably, can I also combine multiple IMAP accounts into a single local folder to get an unified inbox?

The IMAP resource doesn't clone the folder structure and the mails verbatim. Disconnected mode actually handles things in different ways than what you'd expect, because some of the heavy lifting is done by Akonadi to track items, folders, and what not (but mails - rather, message bodies - are kept locally on disk).

einar wrote:The IMAP resource doesn't clone the folder structure and the mails verbatim. Disconnected mode actually handles things in different ways than what you'd expect, because some of the heavy lifting is done by Akonadi to track items, folders, and what not (but mails - rather, message bodies - are kept locally on disk).

Yeah... I can see now that the IMAP Akonadi resource has no logic for cloning remote folders locally at all. So I was wondering if there is or will be any other trick to get it working. Perhaps by using a different mix of Akonadi resources, such as a Local Folder constantly fetching what's changed from the IMAP address.

Sounds like what you'd need is using a script like offlineimap to handle the download, then point Thunderbird and KMail to the same maildir.

einar wrote:Sounds like what you'd need is using a script like offlineimap to handle the download, then point Thunderbird and KMail to the same maildir.

Yeah. Though I'd also prefer that TB and KMail can use the "get new email" function, as well as being able to properly send new emails. Also, only KMail is the issue... Thunderbird does this already, and to some extent I can point KMail to Thunderbird's maildir already.

Isn't the "folder archive" feature what the OP is looking for?

Funny how YMMV. I'm looking to replace Apple's Mail.app with kmail exactly because it doesn't force me to have a local cache of every IMAP account I add (which includes one hosted on my own system, which really doesn't need caching)!

RJVB wrote:Isn't the "folder archive" feature what the OP is looking for?

Funny how YMMV. I'm looking to replace Apple's Mail.app with kmail exactly because it doesn't force me to have a local cache of every IMAP account I add (which includes one hosted on my own system, which really doesn't need caching)!

Ah... I saw an option for folder archives actually. But I'm not sure if that completely clones all IMAP folders. Can anyone clarify?

And yeah, it depends on what everyone is looking for. If you have low disk space for instance, and don't care to have a local backup of your emails, KMail's default approach is better. I have enough disk space for all my emails though, and prefer being able to access them at any time even if internet goes down for instance.

RJVB wrote:Funny how YMMV. I'm looking to replace Apple's Mail.app with kmail exactly because it doesn't force me to have a local cache of every IMAP account I add (which includes one hosted on my own system, which really doesn't need caching)!

You can switch off disconnected mode for the local account if need be.