Hi!

I'm a KMail-user since many years. My setup is POP3 with a largish local email archive in Maildir format (several folders exceeding 10000 mails by far). Ever since upgrading to KMail2 (currently 4.14.1) I'm experiencing a number of quirks. The most annoying / alarming of which are:

• Frequent notifications that resource "KMail Folder is broken"
• Ghost mails that show up in the message list, but are not readable
• Duplicate mails
• "New mail" notifications while I'm not fetching new mails
• Unrealiable counts of unread messages per folder, making it hard to see where unread messages are waiting
• Long load times when switching to larger folders

Well, these issues are just too severe to live with in the long term. However, i do like KMail a lot for many other reasons, and before dumping it, I want to give it another chance. I guess the most promising way to fixing my installation is to clear all kmail config and indices, then try to import my Mail-folder into a "fresh" kmail2. Some questions on this:

• Is there anything else I should try before resorting to this rather desparate measure?
• What exactly are the things that I will have to wipe? ~/.kde/share/config/kmail2.rc, certainly. What else? How do I clean akoandis indices?
• Is there any way to preserve message status like replied / forwarded?
• Is it even reasonable to expect that this will fix the issues, I'm seeing?

Thanks!
Thomas

Can you try first with an "akonadictl fsck"? This should wipe references to things that are no longer stored in Akonadi. Notice that it will return immediately - things will be done in the background.

Can you try first with an "akonadictl fsck"? This should wipe references to things that are no longer stored in Akonadi. Notice that it will return immediately - things will be done in the background.

Thanks for the hint. Tried that, now. I have not seen "resoruce KMail folders is broken" or ghost mails since (might have been luck, though), but new mail notifications coming out of nowhere is still a problem, as are duplicating mails, and long load times.

When running akonadictl fsck on the console where I did akonadictl start, I see a lot of messages rushing by (and no idea how to capture those). Some read

Code: Select all

"Item "192172" has RID and is dirty."

Some read

Code: Select all

Failed to open part file "" for reading

Some talk something about unreferenced items (but these rush by too fast)

When running akonadictl fsck again, the same messages fly by again. This seems to suggest, there are problems, indeed, but these do not get fixed, somehow. Ideas?

Regards
Thomas

For long load times, do you see increased disk I/O when this occurs?

For long load times, do you see increased disk I/O when this occurs?

Yes, disk is very busy while switching to a large folder. But also with warm disk-cache, switching to a large folder (~20.000 mails), and opening a message, there, will sometimes (not always) take several seconds. Fake new mail messages seem to occur most often in the context of switching between large folders, too.

BTW, I have now in fact encountered all original symptoms, after running akonadictl fsck. I.e. I have also encountered ghost mails, and "resource is broken"-messages, meanwhile. Oh, yes, and unreliable unread-counts... These inconsistencies worry me much more than long load times.

So, if akonadictl fsck did not help, what are the odds on my original plan (wiping the installation, re-importing)?

If you want to wipe (not that I recommend it, but unfortunately I don't use POP) you should wipe *both* the data (~/.local/share/akonadi) *and* the configuration (~/.config/akonadi) at the same time.

Oh well. So I went ahead, stopped akonadi and removed those akonadi files and config. Then tried to get things running again - nope. No idea, what exactly I did wrong, but at that point I was really quite frustrated. And seeing that I'm not the only one experiencing all sorts of trouble with KMail2, I did not feel like putting much more effort into getting that going again. (I am sure that KMail2 is working just fine for some. But judging by so many blog and forum posts, that I've read over the past few days, a large local mail archive is just not KMail2's cup of tea, in the first place). So I decided to call it quits, and look for a different mailer.

You'd think a maildir-archive should be fairly portable? Well, guess again. KMail has a somewhat peculiar interpretation of the maildir-standard WRT folders (I suppose that's in order to allow mixing maildir and mbox), meaning I had to do some conversion first. Then tried to import into evolution -> that seemed to work ok, at first, but had quite some issues with the larger folders, too - and on the second start it garbled all my folder names. So I tried converting to MH, and importing in claws-mail. Worked, of sorts, but claws insisted on dropping all read/replied/forwarded indicators, even though I had properly converted those. Then I set up a local imap-server (dovecot) on my mail archive, and tried copying from there to evolution: That turned out to be really quirky, resulting in half-copied folders and lockups. Well, I did not look for another quirky solution, so bye-bye evolution. Next importing from local imap to claws: Hooray! So claws it is for me, now.

Well, I am not actually happy with this solution, and I hope I can go back to KMail one day. For now, however, I have regained that comforting feeling that my mailer will reliably handle my mail archive.

Thanks for your help!