Hi! I love KMail (particularly its interface and configurability). I have more of a love/hate relationship with Akonadi, particularly since it occasionally duplicates email, mismatches headers with messages, corrupts its database, and sometimes loses email (though losing email has been much rarer in recent years).

One issue I've had that exacerbates some of these problems (and makes KMail very slow and unresponsive) is the fact that KMail regularly syncs all of my mail folders. I have 100+ mail folders, some with 1000+ messages, and so this takes a long time. In the meantime, I can't see new email, send email, or fetch messages to read. It's very frustrating. Is there a way to prevent all of the mail folders syncing in the background? I'd like the Inbox to sync regularly (so I'm notified of new mail), and of course when I enter a mail folder, it needs to be synced.

In the IMAP settings, I know I can disable interval mail checking. However, that has the problem that it also disables checking the Inbox for new mail. In the past (5 years ago), I used two KMail IMAP accounts (both pointing to the same real IMAP account for my email). One only loaded the Inbox and had interval checking, and the other one had all the folders, but had interval checking disabled. However, some of the corruption issues with Akonadi came about from using two KMail IMAP accounts pointing to the same real IMAP account, and so I stopped doing this. The issues with Akonadi significantly reduced after I stopped using this setup, though problems still remain.

I'm currently using KMail 5.11.2 with KDE Frameworks 5.59.0 and Qt 5.12.5, running on Fedora Linux 30 (these are the latest KMail packages from Fedora). My email provides is Microsoft Office365, which I'm accessing through IMAP.

Thanks for any advice!
Stephen

You can change the properties for each IMAP folder. One of these is Retirval. Settings from parent folder or account is used as default. You can define your own sync interval or even disable it at all and sync manualy (F5 when folder is selected).

I don't use this feature for myself, so I can not say if it really works If not, it's a bug

raphaelra,

Thanks for the info! At some point in the past, I had investigated that option, but it seemed I would have to individually configure each mail folder (I have quite a few---it would take a while). But I tried it again, and I think I have things configured as I want! This is what I did:

In Configure KMail:Accounts:Receiving:<my IMAP account>:Modify:General, I disabled interval mail checking.

By default, each individual mail folder's Retrieval options are to "Use options from parent folder or account."

For the top-level folder (which has the account name), under Retrieval, the settings are: "Synchronize when selecting this folder" selected, and "Automatically synchronize after" set to Never. I didn't change anything here, so I presume this comes from the account settings.

For my Inbox folder, I set it to automatically synchronize after 5 minutes.

So far this seems to be doing what I want, but I'll see how it goes as I use it longer.

Thanks for the help!
Stephen

Hi Stephen,

great to hear, it works

Stephen Hartke wrote:/.../, but it seemed I would have to individually configure each mail folder (I have quite a few---it would take a while) ...

Indeed, you have to configure each mail folder separately or organize them in a tree and configure retrival for high(er) level folders. The low(er) level folders could inherit settings from its parents.