Good day

I want to use Kmail as my main email client. I have three IMAP accounts configured in Thunderbird.

How do I make the switch? I am aware that there is an "Import" function in Kmail but that just places the imported mail under a folder "Thunderbird emails".

How do I import the mails from the three different accounts into Kmail disconnect IMAP accounts in order that I do not have to download all the mails again from the IMAP server?

Thanks

Hmm - I've never used dIMAP, so there's a certain amount of guesswork here, but it may be enough to get you thinking in the right direction.

I assume that Thunderbird, because it is dIMAP, downloads the whole message. If I understand it correctly, Thunderbird stores mail in mbox folders - that is all the mail in a folder is stored as one long text file. KMail can do this, but it's not recommended if you have a lot of messages, as it is much slower than maildir folders, where every message is stored as a separate file. The reasons are obvious, as the whole mbox file has to be read in to find a message, then re-written if something is deleted.

It should be possible to create mbox folders and simply paste the content of the TB folder into them, but I wouldn't recommend it. If it were me, I'd create my account using maildir as the default folder format, then point the account to the server and let it pull everything in while I was away from the keyboard - overnight, for instance.

FWIW, procmail once had a problem with a filter that I had written, and when it couldn't handle a message correctly it wrote them into an mbox file. Once I realised what was going on I created a temporary mbox folder in the local inbox of kmail, located it on my laptop, then copied the contents of the mbox file into that folder using dolphin and kwrite. From there I could sort the mail from the local folder in kmail into the correct folders. It worked, but I wouldn't like to do it that way with thousands of messages.

ok, thank you for the valued feedback

I will download the mail again.