[rant] Giving up on Kmail 2 [update: slowly coming back]

Message

sam_i_am · Post by **sam_i_am** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 3:26 pm

I tried. I really did. Installed 4.7.0 at home and kmail migration was a nightmare. After few tries, managed get it to at least not crash at the beginning. On startup, it would ask for kwallet password at least three times (by seemingly different programs). It managed to read my main imap folder acceptably. However, it fails to login to my second imap folder.

Since I host this by myself (Dovecot), I enabled verbose logging options to try to track it down. from all I can see, the password is accepted, but disconnects immediately. This imap folder works fine at work using kmail 1.13.7 (KDE 4.6.5). The deal-breaker is my outgoing connection doesn't work at all (used to work fine in kmail 1.13.7 at home before upgrade). So, I can read email, but can't reply or access old email in my own server. I even tried creating a new UNIX account to see if that was due to some migration mess-up. But it still has all those problems.

I don't know what they did to Kmail, but this thing is now slower than a turtle with its hind legs cut off. I click on an email and it takes 5-10 sec. for the email to appear.

I tried sylpheed and evolution. After having used kmail over the years, I just could not force myself to like them. There were too many missing usability features. Last night I emerged Thunderbird. While interface looks butt-ugly on Linux, at least it is usable and can send and read email from all my accounts. Also, I use TB on the few Windows XP machines that I use. So, it is familiar.

So, I'm sticking with KDE 4.6.5 at work and will not dare update that to 4.7.x until I can verify at home that kmail2 is at least as usable as kmail 1.13.7

I don't really have any detailed steps to file a usable bug report. But, if anyone wants, I can do some debugging. Will keep an eye for updates and see if I can find some time to file a useful bug report or two. But after having read Aaron Siego's opinion of users, I'm rather rpissed off. I do know what I want. Kmail2+akonadi+nepomuk+strigi aint it. I do admit that it is easy to complain. But much harder to contribute. So, I'll lick my wounds and find something that lets me read my $!#@ email.

baaann · Post by **baaann** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 4:46 pm

It seems like the Dev's are aware and working hard to improve it although we are not likely to see the results until 4.8.

Personally I like it, but I only have a single POP3 account and didn't try a migration. It certainly seems to run far better than Evolution. You may not feel you have enough info to file a bug, but maybe it is worth adding the description of your problem as a comment on the linked blog?

For the Thunderbird appearance, it may be worth installing x11-themes/oxygen-gtk, I feel it certainly makes the difference for Firefox and Libreoffice

albright · Post by **albright** » Fri Sep 30, 2011 6:05 pm

kmail2 works just barely OK for me

migration is very poor (a real nightmare with mixed maildir
and mbox formats)

but what really bothers me is there is no way (that I can find
that works) to keep local mail synced between two computers

used to be you could just copy ~/kde4/.../kmail/mail across computers

that does not work with the addition of akonadi database;

Also very bad, now some of my mail is in ~/.../mail but other messages
end up in some akonadi database somewhere so I don't really even know
how to back up my local mail anymore

krinn · Post by **krinn** » Sat Oct 01, 2011 12:25 am

http://dilfridge.blogspot.com/2011/09/w ... tions.html

They not only not listen to users, but also with other devs.
KDE guys rules (in their closed doors)

khumba · Post by **khumba** » Mon Oct 03, 2011 4:38 am

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that, having started with a fresh Akonadi setup and using KMail 4.7.1 for my IMAP account, it rocks. I think it actually feels faster than Thunderbird and seems more customizable, and isn't a screen-hog on my netbook. Syncing is the only thing that I wish were more responsive.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for frameworks, but the integration between the entire kdepim suite, the ability to attach notes to emails and emails to calendar events and have them show up on the system calendar, is fantastic. Now if only there were a decent GUI for searching all the gunk in Nepomuk... (Not krunner of all things.)

So in KMail's defense, if you're switching because the migration sucks... Is that more work than just starting with a fresh KMail 4.7 setup?

Another +1 for oxygen-gtk as well.

Dorsai! · Post by **Dorsai!** » Mon Oct 03, 2011 2:31 pm

My main concern about kmail2 is that it suckes up RAM and CPU time like crazy. When my 10 IMAP accounts got checkt CPU usage hang on 70% for about 20 seconds. For every account there is are two akonadi threads each one taking up about 20 MB of RAM.

I couldn't believe how fast and responsive my desktop behaved after I removed the whole akonadi/nepumuk/strigi bundle. claws-mail (sylpheed fork more optimized on features than on stability, although its rock stable for me) is much better, more configurable than even kmail and not as butt ugly and slow as thunderbird.

Of course I see that there are some cases where the user has a benefit from kmail2 and akonadi, but that theoretical usecase surely is not your 0815 default user.

khumba · Post by **khumba** » Mon Oct 03, 2011 3:27 pm

I'm not sure having 10 IMAP accounts is average user-ish either, but fair enough

. 20MiB is a little ridiculous.

I don't even mind that KMail can't inline quote HTML messages quite yet, but I need sanely flowing content before I'll switch to text emails. If I were to write a Claws plugin that just wraps the body of outgoing messages in <html>, etc... heh. Does an email client as light as Claws that can send HTML messages (preferrably packaged in Gentoo) exist?

Pretty amazing that we even have the option of USE=-semantic-desktop, eh? I've been wondering if that's an officially supported configuration, or if it's something that Gentoo found works, like gnome-light.

Dorsai! · Post by **Dorsai!** » Mon Oct 03, 2011 4:44 pm

KDE is supposed to work on a big variety of platforms, not all of which make use of the semantic desktop features, so it is a wanted, supported and tested feature I can imagine. Of course its only useful for people experimenting with embedded systems, administrators who tailor their own enterprise desktop or us Gentoo users.

The weight it takes of the desktop is amazing. I am on the edge of choosing a lighter window manager anyway but like this I can enjoy the awesome advantages of kwin and plasma without having a popup crazy Windows 7 clone with ubuntu-like performance.

The Gentoo KDE team and their ebuilds are really great. IMHO Gentoo still provides the best KDE experience across all Distros.

ppurka · Post by **ppurka** » Mon Oct 03, 2011 4:52 pm

khumba wrote:I don't even mind that KMail can't inline quote HTML messages quite yet, but I need sanely flowing content before I'll switch to text emails.

Feature request in kmail open for nearly 7 years now: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=92591 . If it was fixed, you would actually have sanely flowing text. Every other email client I have used (even alpine iirc) has this feature implemented.

sam_i_am · Post by **sam_i_am** » Tue Oct 04, 2011 3:47 pm

Two days ago, I went with the testing release for Thunderbird 6.0 and I'm pleasantly surprised how the looks have improved (I'm a sucker for good looks). So, using Thunderbird is now a pleasure after having suffered through slowness of Kmail2. Working gpg/mime/smime is an added bonus.

So, as I mentioned, I will use KDE 4.7.1 at home without Kmail for now. I will miss the nice integration of kmail and korganizer, but that is a minor inconvenience.

As someone else mentioned in this thread, KDE support in Gentoo has been amazing. Kudos to the Gentoo-KDE team for putting up with upstream tantrums. If any devs happen to be in my corner of the world (London, Ontario, Canada), I would be honored to buy them a beverage of their choice

khumba · Post by **khumba** » Wed Oct 05, 2011 6:10 am

Huh, format=flowed, maybe now that Akonadi's finally(?) (almost, kind of?) sorted out, we can get that feature soon. Or get another GSoC student for next summer

.

I checked my IMAP account via my webhost's Roundcube setup, and I was surprised to see a folder that wasn't showing up in KMail. That caused a decent amount of annoyance at KMail, until I realized that in fact the folder doesn't actually exist, doh.

ppurka · Post by **ppurka** » Wed Oct 05, 2011 7:59 am

khumba wrote:Huh, format=flowed, maybe now that Akonadi's finally(?) (almost, kind of?) sorted out, we can get that feature soon.

It has nothing to do with Akonadi. IIRC (don't remember clearly since I gave up on kmail 2 years ago) kmail can show flowed text in emails, but it can't write one. All that is needed in the editor is to put a space+enter instead of just enter when you are writing your email and when you haven't pressed enter yourself. Seems like a very difficult thing to do, eh? This wouldn't have been enough for me to stop using kmail. There were several other very productivity-killing annoyances, which were all long standing multiple-year bugs. I appreciated the very powerful and configurable interface. But when the core is/was rotten, ...

ronino · Post by **ronino** » Wed Oct 12, 2011 3:40 pm

sam_i_am wrote:I tried. I really did. Installed 4.7.0 at home and kmail migration was a nightmare. [...]

Oh man, I'm desperate. Just upgraded to KDE 4.7.2 in the last days and switched from KMail 4.4.x to 4.7. And so far, I have seen exactly one single improvement over the old version (note attaching to e-mails), but otherwise only bugs, bugs, bugs. Searching doesn't work (no results at all), forwarding e-mails doesn't mark the e-mail forwarded, akonadi's mysqld is sucking up 50 % of my CPU most of the time, KMail is "fetching folder contents" all the time, using the quick folder filter empties the mail list, so you can't move e-mails to the filtered folders, KMail duplicates mails, runs all filters again on unread messages in the inbox folder on startup (taking several minutes as it runs them thru spamassassin again), searching recipients from my Google contacts resource doesn't work, and so on, and so on.

Am I doomed just because I have like 80,000 mails lying around? I could handle them very well with KMail 4.4...

If I knew how I could quickly import my mdir/mbox mix of mails into Thunderbird, I would have switched already.

albright · Post by **albright** » Wed Oct 12, 2011 5:14 pm

If I knew how I could quickly import my mdir/mbox mix of mails into Thunderbird, I would have switched already.

there is no doubt that thunderbird is - at the moment - a much better
emailer than kmail2

I haven't found any completely automated way to move kmail mail to thunderbird.

mbox mail can be imported directly (the import/export addon tool is a good
addition to thunderbird)

Here's a good script for converting maildirs:

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/file/23278.html

switching to thunderbird has been like travelling from smog bound Mexico city
to clear mountain air

khumba · Post by **khumba** » Thu Oct 13, 2011 1:08 am

For importing a maildir, or moving mail between clients, why not set up a quick courier-imap instance to talk to a local maildir? It's dead easy; just emerge courier-imap, ensure the following are set,

/etc/courier-imap/imapd wrote: MAILDIR=.maildir # Or wherever you have your maildir under $HOME.
MAILDIRPATH=.maildir

start /etc/init.d/courier-imapd, and you're good to go.

jasn · Post by **jasn** » Thu Oct 13, 2011 2:24 am

Can't speak for others posting their frustrations, but for me, claws-mail was the answer..

BTW, I was able to convert my KMail hierarchy to Thunderbird using the python script referenced here.

Good Luck..

danand · Post by **danand** » Fri Oct 28, 2011 3:18 pm

I've been using kmail since it came out. But now, I have to seriously reconsider. What are the developers thinking!

Kmail2 is probably useful for hobbyists and students now. As a professional with 20k odd emails in my system
( Sarbanes Oxley, CE and product responsibilities ), the new kmail2 has passed the term useful or usable.

Is there a way to downgrade to the old kmail? Is it compilable?
I managed to go through the migration blues but the system is so slow that's it's almost impossible to move or delete
files between and in folders. And why on earth can't I remove/rename the basic folders?!

Linux has been a good idea as it allowed me to tweak what I didn't like/want. But kmail2, where are the files and folders? In a database?
I hope there are recovery tools when ( not if ) anyone of these databases crashes on us.

As a professional Project manager, I have to do a regularly sit down and make risk assessments on the tools I use.
Currently, Kmail2 doesn't pass even the first questions.

If there is a fix/workaround in the pipeline, that pipeline needs to be shortened as it risks Kmail2 to be put on the big scrapyard of deserted projects.
If it had been a private company doing this, the responsible managers and staff had all be fired by now and the shareholders shouting bloody murder!

I'll give it some time before I dump Kmail2 all together. I managed to downmigrate the kmaildirs to Unix MailBox formatted files.
Even Elm was more useful than this Kmail2 today.

But again, it looks and feels like a conspiracy by Microsoft... Make the Kmall2 so unusable that the users even starts reconsidering Windows and Outlook

Really? This is how bad the situation is right now.

//Danand

Tatsh · Post by **Tatsh** » Fri Oct 28, 2011 6:37 pm

I also gave up on KMail a while ago.

I complained to KDE plenty (correctly, by reporting bugs) and gave up. So many bugs (including the random spacing taskbar bug) are pretty much being ignored in SC's and if you want the bug fixes you have to go 9999.

If you only use Gmail:
Use Chrome and Offline Google Mail: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... ldlkglhimk

It sucks to have to switch accounts instead of seeing everything in one Inbox (as was ONCE possible with KMail a LONG time ago without it being impossible to use). That's a tiny price to pay to keep on using your email. The very fact that they put the multiple account switching feature in is amazing anyway because it always seemed like (not too long ago) that Google HATED people having multiple account and worked under the assumption that you only had one.

I have several: potential spam and private stuff, personal/business, and companies I work for who use Google Apps

R_W · Post by **R_W** » Sun Oct 30, 2011 5:29 pm

sam_i_am wrote:Since I host this by myself (Dovecot), I enabled verbose logging options to try to track it down. from all I can see, the password is accepted, but disconnects immediately. This imap folder works fine at work using kmail 1.13.7 (KDE 4.6.5). The deal-breaker is my outgoing connection doesn't work at all (used to work fine in kmail 1.13.7 at home before upgrade). So, I can read email, but can't reply or access old email in my own server. I even tried creating a new UNIX account to see if that was due to some migration mess-up. But it still has all those problems.

I'm assuming you're running Dovecot 2 and are experiencing this bug. I have posted a patch there that fixed it for me.

Post by **asturm** » Sun Oct 30, 2011 6:25 pm

Well, about a week ago the akonadi imap client stopped fetching mails...

affirmedatheist · Post by **affirmedatheist** » Sun Oct 30, 2011 9:08 pm

Kmail is a mess, but I have to give credit to the Gentoo KDE team - KDE on Gentoo really does run smoothly. Thankfully I've been using Thunderbird in my other distribution (LMDE) and have gotten used to it.

sam_i_am · Post by **sam_i_am** » Fri Nov 04, 2011 6:16 pm

R_W wrote:I'm assuming you're running Dovecot 2 and are experiencing this bug. I have posted a patch there that fixed it for me.

Bingo! That definitely is the problem I'm seeing. Do you know if this patch has made it's way to 4.7.2 (or 3) release? If so, will definitely give it a try at home.

Thanks

Edit: Looks like it didn't make it to 4.7.3. That's unfortunate as it was submitted in Aug. This was a showstopper for me. I patched it myself and thanks to you, I can start using kmail again.

ppurka · Post by **ppurka** » Wed Nov 23, 2011 1:59 am

5th: KMail - 1/5 Avoid at all costs. What a nightmare.

There, the verdict is out

Source: http://www.techradar.com/news/software/ ... ed-1041236

Post by **asturm** » Wed Nov 23, 2011 2:10 am

kdepim packages 4.7.49.9999 recently rebuilt and kontact/kmail works quite ok now...

gcasillo · Post by **gcasillo** » Wed Nov 23, 2011 6:37 pm

I gave up on KMail about two years ago. I'm a straight GMail user now, and that includes using their mail hosting services for a couple of my domains. I ran an install of Dovecot, et al on a server, and while I got it working, it was ridiculous how much time and effort was necessary to set it up and maintain it.

I ditched KMail for the same reasons everyone else has mentioned. Very heavy handed development. They compel one to bottom post, because that's their chosen way, and they give no options to cleanly do it any other way. It's their way or the highway. Easy choice really, and I've not looked back.

That said, I'll echo the sentiment that the Gentoo KDE devs are some of the best around. Timely releases, good communication, and they make KDE usage a pleasurable experience for end users and themselves alike. Thumbs up!

[rant] Giving up on Kmail 2 [update: slowly coming back]

[rant] Giving up on Kmail 2 [update: slowly coming back]

Re: [rant] Giving up on Kmail 2 (for now)

kmail2? It got to be a Microsoft conspiracy

Re: [rant] Giving up on Kmail 2 (for now)

Re: [rant] Giving up on Kmail 2 (for now)