KDE Plasma: v5.8.5
KDE Frameworks: v5.28.0
Qt: v5.6.1
Kernel: 4.8.0-42-generic
OS Type: 64-bit
KMail: 5.2.3

I have some local folders that I don't use. All me email is on an IMAP email server. The bottom of my email window seems to be permanently syncing folders. Why? What is this? Why does it need to do this? How can I stop i?

Michael Barraclough

If you expand the progress bar (up arrow on the right), what operation is displayed there?

It seems that this is the best place to post my problem.
I've got 3 imap accounts:
- company account on gmail
- personal account on gmail
- personal account on my server (postfix+dovecot)

For account on my own server I registered to few mailing list, about 50 e-mails per day, tens of thousands received already - I don't have much problems with this account. Syncing any folder takes less than 5 seconds.

My problems are with company account - "All Mail" folder is synced very frequently, single sync takes more than 1 minute. While this folder is synced I'm unable to view e-mails in other folders on this account. Often it blocks access to other accounts.

During weekend the only traffic on company account are notifications from monitoring system. Sometimes 10 per 5 minutes, sometime none for hours. Often kmail does not notice, or notify about, these alert e-mails even after clicking "update this folder". iPad and Android devices, setup for sync every 15 minutes, "see" those e-mails.

Before reporting here I had a major problem with akonadi+mysqld - when scanning documents, e-mails my computer become unresponsive - no keyboard reaction, no mouse pointer reaction just hard disk diode activity and fan. I tweaked some settings:
- deadline instead of cfq for hard disk
- no-cow for akonadi (on btrfs)
- more threads for mysqld, bigger buffers, 1s fsync
- swappiness
Now it's more responsive.

I don't believe that my tweaks are reason for frequent and long syncing of "All Mail" folder but as always - there might be some connection I can't see.

If not for my tweaks my computer would crawl under akonadi+mysqld one more time.
I received long e-mail/report yesterday that kmail displays as empty email or displays "please wait" for more than 10 minutes. After restarting kmail it crashed, then akonadi crashed. Now it loops over "All mail" again and again.

Most causes of "Please wait" should have been fixed by the newer Applications releases (two days ago).
As for responsiveness, your issues occur only when new mail arrives?

Retrieving Folder Contents

Please wait . . .

Still present and more visible than before.

Steps to reproduce:
1. receive mail
2. click inbox
3. click all mail

Every email account is now affected

I'm using archlinux and today I installed kde-applications upgrade to version 17.04.

Now after "sycing" "All Mail" I can no longer select any other directory in any account added.
It worked for a while before I entered "All Mail" folder.

For some time after syncing "kontact" was taking about 85% cpu, now everything is quiet and stuck. I double clicked 2.8MB message in "All Mail" and I can only see colorful bar animated from left to right. Restarting akonadi (akonadictl restart) does not help. akonadictl fsck did not found any problem.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=378928

Are you using GMail, and did you set an application-specific password, by any chance?

Yes - this is gmail account for my company. Sorry for not mentioning this earlier.

I've removed all configuration of kde (.config, .kde, .cache, .local) and added only company's gmail and my personal imap (own server). Now it seems that it works much better.

Still I'm unable to open this "big" email.

Just noticed that after clicking this big message and then opening Settings-> Configure kmail -> Accounts -> Receiving I can see that my company account is at 60000% progress.

Everything stabilised until our server monitoring started flooding us with mails. Kmail started refreshing "All Mails" and did not refreshed Inbox.

Could the synchronisation of everything that user is not currently interested (like "All Mail") be done in some kind of "background"?

Email storm has ended. I disabled refreshing of entire account and added refreshing only for Inboxes. Now it works for some time and then it hangs with refreshing one of Inboxes. Cancelling refresh does not help - only akonadictl restart helps.

And another effect - it stops refreshing anything at all - no progress bar, no errors just does nothing except displaying already scanned emails. Clicking refresh folder or Check Mail does not help. Restart of akonadi helps.

Hi,

I see multiple issues that you are probably begin affected by:

1) IMAP stops syncing until Akonadi is restarted: the IMAP resource gets stuck sometimes as some task gets stuck, preventing the ResourceScheduler from scheduling any further tasks (like syncing a folder) until the resource is restarted. This is currently very high up on my todo list, including a re-design of the API to prevent tasks getting stuck like this and allow multiple parallel tasks.

2) Opening large emails takes eternity: KMail tries to look for emoticons (smileys) in each email in order to replace them with picture emojis. There's a known bug that causes KMail to scan the entire email, including possibly a binary attachment, which takes a ton of time. You disable this via View -> Disable emoticons and see if it helps

3) Folder constantly syncing - Gmail, unfortunately, has a buggy implementation of an incremental sync feature of IMAP, so we don't use it when talking to Gmail, which makes synchronization more expensive. There are some ways around it, but we haven't implemented them yet.

There can be some other issue involved, this is just a guess from what you described. I'm sorry you are fighting with Gmail like this, but they are not making it easy for us

Thank you very much for your answer.
Can I somehow help?

-- edited --
Disabling smiles does not help with opening 2.8MB mail. This mail does not have any attachemets and does not contain anything that could be considered "binary". It's plain text mail.

Hello,

May I ask if anyone knows where there is any progress on these issues?

I've also noticed issues 1) and 3) in Dan Vrátil (progdan)'s post: viewtopic.php?f=215&t=139394#p375588

Kontact -> Configure Kontact -> Mail -> Accounts, Syncing folder 'Inbox' (266500%)
After clicking "Modify..." but doing nothing and just clicking "Ok" or "Cancel", it turns to "Ready" after a splashing of some texts. The actual percentage seems related to the amount of messages in "Inbox". There is a bug report on bugs.kde.org regarding this symptom: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=339845

The account could also be stuck without showing the weird percentage but just no status being shown. It seems, but I'm not sure about, that the symptoms 1) and 3) might be caused by the same root reason.

According to system journal, syncing stuck seems related to akonadi_imap_resource "attempting client step after doneflag". When the status of account is empty (not showing "Ready"), this message appears in journalctl log. But I don't know who comes first. Clicking "Restart" button could bring the account back to "Ready". But sometimes we need to restart the account.

No specific pattern has been observed on this problem. Network connection seems perfect, and computer resources seem normal, too.

Regards,
Haoxian

I am still seeing this problem with two IMAP accounts. One account is connecting to my home IMAP server which is running on Cyrus IMAP. This account holds emails going back 24 years. The other account is with Microsoft Office365, also using IMAP.

My home account is continually syncing and often trying to open even a short email can hang, requiring me to restart akonadi. Often when Akonadi gets stuck I can restart it and it completes. I run fsck and vacuum but that doesn't seem to help.

This is with OpenSUSE Tumbleweed with Akonadi 17.12.3 and Kontact also version 17.12.3.

This is happening on several computers, all connecting to the same servers. On some machines I have them configured to use Postfix instead of Mysql but that doesn't seem to make any difference.

The server info for Office 365 is:
IMAP4
IMAP4REV1
AUTH=PLAIN
AUTH=XOAUTH2
SASL-IR
UIDPLUS
MOVE
ID
UNSELECT
CLIENTACCESSRULES
CLIENTNETWORKPRESENCELOCATION
BACKENDAUTHENTICATE
CHILDREN
IDLE
NAMESPACE
LITERAL+

For my Cyrus account it is:
IMAP4REV1
LITERAL+
ID
ENABLE
ACL
RIGHTS=KXTE
QUOTA
MAILBOX-REFERRALS
NAMESPACE
UIDPLUS
NO_ATOMIC_RENAME
UNSELECT
CHILDREN
MULTIAPPEND
BINARY
CATENATE
CONDSTORE
ESEARCH
SORT
SORT=MODSEQ
SORT=DISPLAY
THREAD=ORDEREDSUBJECT
THREAD=REFERENCES
ANNOTATEMORE
LIST-EXTENDED
WITHIN
QRESYNC
SCAN
XLIST
URLAUTH
URLAUTH=BINARY
X-NETSCAPE
LOGINDISABLED
COMPRESS=DEFLATE
IDLE

The Cyrus IMAP server is running Cyrus 2.14.18 from OpenSuSE 42.3 (I haven't upgraded my server yet).