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allistarM
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 08, 2011 10:07 pm    Post subject: How I fixed KMail 4.7.3 issues Reply with quote

Hi all,
After upgrading KDE to 4.7.3 I had major issues with KMail (which I use in the Kontact suite). The migration didn't work, so I ran it manually as per the instructions and while my accounts, settings and mail folders migrated ok, the mail itself did not. Using the "Import Messages" wizard and selecting "Import KMail Maildirs and Folder Structure" was hit and miss. (This was from a backup of my mail I took before upgrading). Some folders came across, some did not. I have over 1.5Gb of archived mail. I managed to get most of the mail in by a very laborious task of importing individual folders.

When using KMail I would get the UI consistently hang while akonadi was looking for something. This prevented me from doing something as simple as reading an email. This is no good - a mail client that won't let me read my emails!? The culprit I have decided is akonadi. Here's how to keep it out of the way: (Do at your own risk - it worked for me. Read to the end so you know what you're getting into. This will lose any mail that is not in your backup.)

- make sure you have a backup or your pre 4.7.3 emails (usually from ~/.kde4/share/apps/kmail/mail).

- close kmail (or kontact idf that's what you use) and stop akonadi (akonadictl stop)

- remove the akonadi database by doing "rm -rf ~/.local/share/akonadi" and "rm -rf /.config/akonadi".

- start Kmail/Kontact You'll notice there are no mail folders. Add a local repository in the KMail settings dialog in the "Accounts" section - select "Add" and then "Maildir"

- import your backed up mail by using the File->Import form, select the "Import KMail Maildirs and Folder Structure" and follow the prompts. If you select the root of the mail backup it should import all of your mails with no issues (at least, it did for me with).

- Add in all of your previous POP3/IMAP accounts. For some reason for me when I did this it remembered the previous settings (I have 9 POP3 accounts to check).

In a nutshell this has reverted to the old behaviour of using a local mail store instead of the unnecessary monstrosity that is akonadi.

Hope this helps someone.
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allistarM
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PostPosted: Thu Dec 08, 2011 10:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You may be able to achieve the same result by simply adding a new local mail store, moving your folder structures and mail to it, and deleting the akonadi store.
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anyNiXwilldo
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 09, 2011 4:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I found a much simpler solution:

emerge -C kmail korganizer kontact kaddressbook
emerge --depclean
emerge thunderbird

This is not a Gentoo issue, but is a KDE issue and is the reason I left KDE at the dawn of 4.0. I read the migration guide. Nothing in it worked. KDE seems to have issues making things 'just work.' Now all of my emails are gone, even though I have the backups, because the backups can not be imported. I have spent 45 minutes attempting to fix KDE's issues. I will spend not one second more. Can I track it down? Yes. Could I eventually fix it? Yes, but the problem is, I do not care to fix KDE's bugs and will waste no more of my time on this. Lesson learned, although I suppose I should have learned it at 4.0.
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franzf
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 09, 2011 7:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

anyNiXwilldo wrote:
emerge -C kmail korganizer kontact kaddressbook
emerge --depclean
emerge thunderbird

Yes, the usual "use thunderbird"... I had problems with kmail2, too. Was looking for an alternative. Problem with thunderbird: >80MB for the download! (Our connection just makes 45 Kb/s...)
I am using IMAP.
So trying sylpheed. Plain ugly, had problems with attachments.
claws-mail? Looked OK, but after some time i noticed: there are problems with opening attachements. (You have to manually enter an executable. Once entered, it will open all files with that program, which will fail. And guess: After some time it forgot how to open a specific attachment...)
So finally: Try thunderbird.
And - yes, problem with attachements :( thunderbird downloads the mail with all its attachments (remember: 45Kb/s), then it displays the mail text and - huh? - it starts to download each attachment, again! This somewhere gets stuck, no progress anymore. So mails get never cached, if I want to read a mail, again, it has to downlad it again. Attachements can't be viewed, as they never finish to downlad. Quite usable, isn't it?

So back to kmail2. It has its own problems, but those are somehow better to manage...
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Xywa
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Joined: 23 Jul 2005
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 09, 2011 9:47 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

anyNiXwilldo wrote:
Now all of my emails are gone, even though I have the backups, because the backups can not be imported. I have spent 45 minutes attempting to fix KDE's issues.


I have the same problem. But I had over 20000 emails from last 7 years and I can NOT lost it. I would rather downgrade to KDE 4.6.5. I spent last night (went sleep 5am) trying to fix it, but with no success. Appart many problems (I will start new topic with this) I have no idea how to import all old emails. Do I have do this manually for any folder (I have got over 700 folder for my emails in my old kmail)?

I hope we will find a sollution :(
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mpcww
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 09, 2011 9:00 pm    Post subject: Easy mail migration to thunderbird's mbox Reply with quote

I just found an old but still working script and description to migrate eaily with my 13000 mails to thunderbird.

http://dcwww.fys.dtu.dk/~schiotz/comp/kmail2thunder.html

It worked quite fast.
Mail in income and sent folder I had to move to a regular local folder first.

may be this is useful to someone
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ppurka
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PostPosted: Sat Dec 10, 2011 1:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

franzf wrote:

So finally: Try thunderbird.
And - yes, problem with attachements :( thunderbird downloads the mail with all its attachments (remember: 45Kb/s), then it displays the mail text and - huh? - it starts to download each attachment, again! This somewhere gets stuck, no progress anymore. So mails get never cached, if I want to read a mail, again, it has to downlad it again. Attachements can't be viewed, as they never finish to downlad. Quite usable, isn't it?

So back to kmail2. It has its own problems, but those are somehow better to manage...
You should look at the "Synchronization and Storage" settings for your mail folder in Thunderbird. There are many options there to manage downloading of mails and attachments. In particular, you should download all the mail irrespective of its size and store it locally.

There could be more options regarding attachments in the advanced config editor. I have not needed to use that yet.
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Timothee
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 30, 2011 1:54 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

anyNiXwilldo wrote:

This is not a Gentoo issue, but is a KDE issue


It has become a gentoo issue when kde 4.7.3 and kmail2 were made stable, and poor chaps like me "emerge -uD world"-ed in blissful ignorance, and are now in a world of pain :(

Thanks OP for solution, I will try this tonight.
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hephooey
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PostPosted: Fri Dec 30, 2011 4:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I do not think Akonadi keeps the actual content of your emails in its database, according to this blog:
http://blogs.kde.org/node/4503
The migration is painfully long and memory hungry, I added 10 G swap (I have 4 G memory) and waited almost a day until kmail finished going through all my emails. After the migration everything seems to be fine. There are some rough edges, the most noticable one for me is this one:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=223488
I have a local dir contains 200k mails and open it cost about 3 G memory.
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jakeluck
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 10, 2012 7:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

got bitten last week during emerge world. So far tried osmo, abook, Thunderbird: each has its
own problems. Anyone here tried upgrade to a latter version of KDE?
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albright
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 10, 2012 7:37 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Quote:
I do not think Akonadi keeps the actual content of your emails in its database,


That is the way it is **supposed** to work. I found that kmail frequently kept
mail only in the akonadi database. It usually migrated to my mail folder after
a while (maybe it would eventually always do so).

But the bottom line was - at any given time I could not be sure that all
my mail was in my mail folder. That was, to me, completely unacceptabel.
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ArneBab
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PostPosted: Wed Jan 16, 2013 1:44 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

albright wrote:
Quote:
I do not think Akonadi keeps the actual content of your emails in its database,

That is the way it is **supposed** to work. I found that kmail frequently kept
mail only in the akonadi database. It usually migrated to my mail folder after
a while (maybe it would eventually always do so).

The same happened to me (that’s when I switched to using fetchmail+procmail for retrieving mails and using KMail2 only as an interface to maildirs) and it now happened to a SUSE-using colleague of mine…

But KMail did not migrate to the mail folder at all without telling me so…

I did not find a fix, yet.
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