Hi,

My laptop had to undergo maintenance, and its HDD has been changed.

I thus had to reinstall everything, and decided to move on with LinuxMint12 together with KDE 4.7.2.

I didn't had the opportunity to export all my malboxes from Kmail 4.4.

I just have a backup of all my /home, including hidden folders.

There must be a way for Kontact 4.7 to restore the mail folders I had in Kontact 4.4.
I tried to copy the content of /Baackup/home/.kde/share/apps/kmail/ into ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail2, as well as in a new ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail folder, but without results.

What would be the correct solution?
Is it possible to install a Kmail 4.4 together with the 4.7 version, export everything, and then import it in the new version of Kontact?

Thanks a lot for your help

I think you were looking in the wrong place. Your messages would not be stored in ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/ - the most likely place would be in ~/Mail or ~/Maildir (different locations in different distros). Check your backup again. If you can see the messages (you should even be able to open one to check using KMail viewer) then you could try simply copying that directory onto your new system.

Since this is a 4.7 system, it will be necessary for akonadi import of the messages, which will be slow and may even freeze KMail for some time, but it should work.

annew wrote:I think you were looking in the wrong place. Your messages would not be stored in ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/ - the most likely place would be in ~/Mail or ~/Maildir (different locations in different distros).

Hi,

thanks for your prompt reply.

unfortunately, I do not have any ~/(.)Mail nor ~/(.)Maildir forlders, in none of my Backups, nor in my current /home...

On the other hand, the backuped ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/ contains quite a lot of data, including a .../mail/ folder in which I could find the full tree of folders I used to have in my previous Kmail.
These folders even contain my e-mails (just checked!), which can be opened with a text editor.

annew wrote:it will be necessary for akonadi import of the messages,

Thanks for the tip, I didn't have the curiosity to look for an "import" function.
I could import a KMail folder structure from my backup to my new Konotact 4.7

thanks again for your help!!

~/Mail is a very old location for KMail mail, it has been ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail for years.

In any case, KMail finds the actual location through a configuration entry. In kmailrc, there is a section named [General] which contains an entry called "folders"

If the entry does not exist or is empty, then the current default of ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail is assumed (please be aware that some distributions have changed the base path for local KDE data to ~/.kde4, you can run kde-config4 --localprefix to check that).

The migrator read this settings to find your local mail. If you want to that manually, you will have to point a "Maildir" or "KMail Folders" account/resource to that directory manually.
The main difference between the two is that the latter can read mbox folder inside the mail tree and understands KMail index files. The normal "maildir" one is more efficient though (less legacy overhead).

Cheers,
_