I have found my mails in /home/doahh/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/ and I can see the top level folders with mail in them but if I have created a sub-folder and placed mails in there I can't find those mail anywhere in my home directory. If I move the mails from the sub-folder into a top level folder then they appear in the expected location.

Does anyone know where/how mails in sub-folders get stored?

I believe it depends on the type of folder selected. You may also wish to check to see if the folder is hidden ( with a "." at the beginning ).

Thanks for the reply.

I was looking for a folder in the 'Local Folders' so that it was:

Local Folders => My folder => My sub-folder

I did check for hidden directories but there was nothing there. The accounts that receive mail are a mixture of IMAP and POP3.

If you run the command "find" in Konsole in that directory, is the sub-folders name mentioned anywhere in the output?

Under /home/doahh/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/ do you not have a folder 'imap'? All folders that relate to the imap mail would, I would expect, be under that. You do have the follow the tree down - I see mine under /home/anne/.kde/share/apps/kmail/imap/.133252502.directory/.INBOX.directory

Find doesn't return anything about the folders:

Code: Select all

cd ~/doahh/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/mailing-lists
find magnolia


find: ‘magnolia’: No such file or directory

There is also no mention of this folder in the imap folder although in the 'magnolia' example given above, the magnolia folder is in:

Code: Select all

Local Folders => mailing-lists => magnolia


This is also true of folders without a hyphen in the name, i.e. friends/myfriend as opposed to mailing-lists/magnolia.

It is not that the emails are not available through KMail, just that they don't seem to be stored in the standard way. This makes me a little cautious about backups of email as I would be unsure they would be backed up if they were in a sub-folder and have no way of moving them to a new installation of KMail manually if it were required as I would have no way of knowing where to put them.

The find command is not supposed to be used like that.

Code: Select all

find ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail | grep -i magnolia

Thank you for the solution. They are indeed found in:

~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/.mailing-lists.directory/magnolia/cur

I was confused as they weren't in 'mailing-lists' but 'mailing-lists.directory' and for some strange reason I didn't see that directory.

The reason you did not see that directory is because it is hidden ( is prefixed with . )