Re: [gentoo-user] Anyone succeeded with kmail2?

[Francesco Talamona <francesco.talamona@know.eu>]

> On 4.9.3 you are still experiencing something similar. Hmmm. Indicates
> to me a high probability of a systemic problem with the projects
> approach, something that is unlikely to ever get really fixed. In my
> opinion kdepim2 is vastly over-engineered and an attempt to solve a
> problem that does not actually exist. I recommend you use a different
> mail app.

After an indescribable amount of pain and time wasted I was able to regain 
control over my mail.

I recently migrated a kmail used nearly for ten years to the latest kmail2. 
Migration took around a month of struggle.

It's mandatory to have nepomuk+akonadi running (I configured file indexing to 
run only on a folder containing a few files), it has to be checked for mail 
too.

In the migration you'll lose your filters, your profiles, and the flag of the 
mail will be randomly changed (thousands of read mail will come up unread, 
"important" flag will be lost... And so on).

If you try to reimport (after deleting the akonadi database as somewhere 
advised) the mail from ~/Mail you'll discover the the import tool is unable to 
handle maildir (or mailbox, I don't remember) format. If, like me, you used 
kmail for several years, then not all mail folders have the same format, given 
the fact that the default was changed during time.

Beware also that full text indexing is on per default for every mail folder 
created. So, as soon as I imported a mail folder, I deselected this option by 
hand (under folder properties -> maintenance).

So, this is the step-by-step guide to migrate to kmail2:

* backup your ~ folder, especially ~/Mail, ~/.config and ~/.kde4

* make sure akonadi, nepomuk & co are running (with the command "akonadictl 
status" for example).

* look carefully in ~/.xsession-errors if some errors appear related to 
akonadi, nepomuk, mysql, soprano, virtuoso... Do not migrate if you see any 
errors, fix them first. 

for example the following error is guaranteed to slowly and painfully drain 
all of your setup and mail to a black hole:

Soprano: "Could not connect to server at /tmp/ksocket-sko/nepomuk-socket (No 
such file or directory)"

* Delete everything no more necessary (mail messages, old accounts...).

* Archive every folder you want to migrate and delete them from the old client

* Take note of your filters, especially if some of them makes elaborate 
operations, mail account settings, profile preferences...

* backup again, just to be sure

* upgrade kmail, and start kmail2, let it run for the time needed (one night 
or more is normal) until the I/O and CPU load are back to a reasonable level

* reimport archived folder (and disable for each one full text indexing before 
is started)

* reconfigure filters, accounts, profiles...

* backup for the last time

Hoping to save someone else the waste of time I went through.

F. Talamona