I'm having a number of issues with KDE, mainly with Kmail failing to update the IMAP server after messages have been read or moved to different folders and with me not being to add some applications to the application launcher or remove applications from the favourites in the launcher.

The problems only appear to affect my user account, I have created a temporary test user which doesn't suffer from these issues so I'm assuming the problems are due to corruption of some of my config files. Since I've been using KDE on this PC for many years since version 3 I expect there's a lot of irrelevant config files, some of which might be causing the problem.

I'm considering resetting my configuration back to an initial default condition but I need some advice about what files I need to delete. I'm assuming I need to delete most of ~/.cache, ~/.config, probably everything in ~/.kde and ~/.kde4 and a selection of stuff from ~/.local/share.

To add to the complication I have a lot of Kmail settings which would need recreating, e.g. over twenty email identities, details of five different mail servers, lots of email filter rules and non default properties on numerous mail folders. Ideally I'd like to backup as much of this as possible in a form that can be used to help me reconfigure things afterwards

Hi!

The folders you mentioned seem plausible. Most config files end with rc, e.g. plasmashellrc, okularrc, ... and the matching folders in ~/.local/share/ are called like the program. The configurations are plain text files you can read with a text editor like Kate.

Akonadi itself is a bit more complicated as it has a lot of configuration files and database(s) in ~/.local/share like ~/.config/emailidentities for your identities. I'd try to fix akonadi at first. Check that all files are owned by your user and have limited access for group/others. Akonadi itself has some self-cleanup functions.

Code: Select all

# checking permissions example
find ~/.config/akonadi -ls

# akonadi consistency check (and repair)
akonadictl --verbose fsck

# akonadi self cleanup
akonadictl --verbose vacuum


If this doesnt help, Kontact also has an export wizard (Tools->Import/Export) where you can export what you need and later import it again in a clean new profile.

I suggest starting with a new user and partwise migrate the old configuration to the new one, but if you want to "reset" the configuration manually, you can login on a tty (no gui) and move the folders you want to get newly created, e.g.

Code: Select all

mv ~/.local/share/emailidentities{,.old}

Do not move those folders while graphically logged in with the user that files are being moved as it can mess up the whole configuration.

Thanks koffeinfriedhof.

I tried akonadi consistency check which found and repaired a number of issues. After doing this and running akonadi self cleanup there was an improvement but it was only temporary and my problems returned within a couple of days.

Rather than risking making things even worse by arbitrarily deleting various config files I took your suggestion of setting up a new user and using Kontact's import/export tool to migrate my emails into the new user account. This proved to be only partially successful and needed a lot of manual tidying up afterwards but did get me there in the end.

My first migration attempt was not successful because it appeared to be trying to set up filter rules before it had copied mail folders from the IMAP account and kept prompting me to create the destination folders for moving emails to.

For a second attempt I cleared all KDE configurations by deleting everything in the new user's home directory and then manually setting up all my IMAP and SMTP accounts in Kmail before attempting to import any data. This was more successful although it ended up creating duplicates email accounts in Kmail which I needed to delete.

The import was still only partially successful, the main deficiency was that it failed to transfer properties for any folders and although it copied all my filter rules it failed to set the destination folders for rules which required emails to be moved. I had kept my original user account so I was able to refer to this to manually set the folder properties and filter destinations.

Migrating Knotes with Kontact's import/export tool proved to be a total failure. It transferred a couple of config files but absolutely no data. I was however able to recreate all my notes by using akonadi console to dump them to XML and copying the text from the payload of each note to paste into a new note.

After finally getting Kmail set up correctly I moved all my data files from my original user account along with a few selected config files for some non KDE applications.

Although this was a long and tedious process it appears to have been well worth the effort because I've been running for a couple of weeks now without suffering from any of my previous problems.

Glad you finally made it!

I do not use kmail/kontact a lot as my main tool is Emacs which also does the mailing stuff for me (I remember setting it up was a masochist act too). But I know that working with akonadi can be a mess, depending on the providers you use. The easiest ones seem to be web.de and the german Telekom.de as providers. With all others used I did had issues over the years. But they have other deficits.