[gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[Mick]

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... or what the unbelievable lack of maturity of KDEPIM devs has landed us in:

I have upgraded KDE on my old laptop to see what gives.  Surprisingly, it was 
not *too* bad; i.e. my old emails were not corrupted, deleted or otherwise 
affected.

However, the following are things that didn't really work as a rational human 
being would expect with a PIM setup, let alone anyone who's running this in a 
production environment with loads of users!

The auto-migration did not work.  It only worked partially for some mail 
account settings, but did not leave behind a workable system, with half the 
account settings missing.

The kmail-migrator --interactive also did not work.

I had to change the location pointing to the local mail folders - I keep mine 
under ~/Mail.  Then after pressing F5 on each folder akonadi scanned the 
respective mail directory and my stored messages showed up!  :-)

Partial success here, however, because the Sent mail subfolders were not 
imported, linked to or showed up.  I keep my sent mail in separate subfolders 
according to the account that I sent messages from and they are stored there 
using kmails filters.

Trying to manually import ~/Mail/.sent-mail.directory/Sent-Gmail, etc. did not 
work no matter how many times I tried.

Eventually I set up a new local resource account (Settings/Accounts/Add) and 
pointed this to .sent-mail.directory.  It imported everything, but as a new 
top-level folder.  :-(

I tried a number of times to update these, but sqlite3 just hangs for some 
reason and neither completes the update, not does it complain (when launching 
kmail from a terminal).  I don't know if mysql would be more successful here.

The migration of the email account Settings was even less successful.  The 
settings for Sending transferred across, but the account settings for 
Receiving did not survive.  Well, let me be more precise here.  They did 
survive, as they were all still in the kmailrc file.  I checked this against a 
back up.  No matter, they didn't show up under accounts.

I resorted to recreating these from scratch using the kmail GUI and other than 
some changes on the GUI fields, the pop3 email accounts worked fine.  

The IMAP4 accounts were less of a success however.  I recreated them from 
scratch, but no messages showed up under Inbox.  Sent and Trash work fine.

Having ran out of time I was wondering if you came across such breakages and 
if so how did you fix them.

For now I have masked KDEPIM 4.7 on all of my remaining boxen.  This is too 
messy to have to fix more than once, if I can fix it at all that is!

The only thing that's keeping me from mutt is the zillion shortcut commands 
that I need to learn ... old dog/new tricks and all that.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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Re: [gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[Peter Ruskin]

On Thursday 29 December 2011 00:43:39 Mick wrote:
> ... or what the unbelievable lack of maturity of KDEPIM devs has
> landed us in:
>
> I have upgraded KDE on my old laptop to see what gives.
>  Surprisingly, it was not *too* bad; i.e. my old emails were not
> corrupted, deleted or otherwise affected.
>
> However, the following are things that didn't really work as a
> rational human being would expect with a PIM setup, let alone
> anyone who's running this in a production environment with loads
> of users!

That's why I've given up on KDE4.  I tried other mail clients but 
only kmail suits me.  So I keep using kde-3.5.10 from the 
kde-sunset overlay.

-- 
Peter
========================================================================
Gentoo Linux: Portage 2.2.0_alpha28		kernel-3.0.3-gentoo
AMD Phenom(tm) 9950 Quad-Core Processor		gcc(Gentoo: 4.5.3-r2)
KDE: 3.5.10					Qt: 3.3.8b
========================================================================

Re: [gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[Frank Steinmetzger]

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On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 12:43:39AM +0000, Mick wrote:

> For now I have masked KDEPIM 4.7 on all of my remaining boxen.  This is too 
> messy to have to fix more than once, if I can fix it at all that is!
> 
> The only thing that's keeping me from mutt is the zillion shortcut commands 
> that I need to learn ... old dog/new tricks and all that.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.  Many are fairly intuitive; <d>elete,
<t>ag, <v>iew attachments and so on.  And if you’ve used vi before, navigation
isn’t that big a problem either.  The biggest problem is the entry barrier; you
need to create an rc file, set up other programs for sending and receiving and
some own shortcuts, e.g. for using a spam filter.  But I reckon it’s worth it.
-- 
Gruß | Greetings | Qapla'
I forbid any use of my email addresses with Facebook services.

“I'm always right.
This time I'm just even more right than usual.” – Linus Torvalds

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Re: [gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[Mick]

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On Thursday 29 Dec 2011 11:16:57 Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 12:43:39AM +0000, Mick wrote:
> > For now I have masked KDEPIM 4.7 on all of my remaining boxen.  This is
> > too messy to have to fix more than once, if I can fix it at all that is!
> > 
> > The only thing that's keeping me from mutt is the zillion shortcut
> > commands that I need to learn ... old dog/new tricks and all that.
> 
> Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.  Many are fairly intuitive;
> <d>elete, <t>ag, <v>iew attachments and so on.  And if you’ve used vi
> before, navigation isn’t that big a problem either.  The biggest problem
> is the entry barrier; you need to create an rc file, set up other programs
> for sending and receiving and some own shortcuts, e.g. for using a spam
> filter.  But I reckon it’s worth it.

Thanks Frank for your words of encouragement!  I'm inching closer to mutt by 
the day ... unless KDEPIM 4.7 has become usable by the time 4.4.11.1 is 
withdrawn from the main tree, I'm out of KDE.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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Re: [gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[Yohan Pereira]

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On Thursday 29 Dec 2011 12:11:54 Mick wrote:
> Thanks Frank for your words of encouragement!  I'm inching closer to mutt
> by  the day ... unless KDEPIM 4.7 has become usable by the time 4.4.11.1 is
> withdrawn from the main tree, I'm out of KDE.

Hang on in there for 4.8, people (or fanbois not sure) are saying good things 
about it.

-- 

- Yohan Pereira

"A man can do as he will, but not will as he will" - Schopenhauer

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Re: [gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[Frank Steinmetzger]

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On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 06:05:38PM +0530, Yohan Pereira wrote:
> On Thursday 29 Dec 2011 12:11:54 Mick wrote:
> > Thanks Frank for your words of encouragement!  I'm inching closer to mutt
> > by  the day ... unless KDEPIM 4.7 has become usable by the time 4.4.11.1 is
> > withdrawn from the main tree, I'm out of KDE.
> 
> Hang on in there for 4.8, people (or fanbois not sure) are saying good things 
> about it.

I, too, am going to test 4.8. Before the KDEPIM 2 hell started, I was a big fan
of KMail and co.
-- 
Gruß | Greetings | Qapla'
I forbid any use of my email addresses with Facebook services.

The Rhine is a fountain of youth: one sip and you won’t get old.

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Re: [gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[ny6p01]

On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 12:16:57PM +0100, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 29, 2011 at 12:43:39AM +0000, Mick wrote:
> 
> > For now I have masked KDEPIM 4.7 on all of my remaining boxen.  This is too 
> > messy to have to fix more than once, if I can fix it at all that is!
> > 
> > The only thing that's keeping me from mutt is the zillion shortcut commands 
> > that I need to learn ... old dog/new tricks and all that.
> 
> Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.  Many are fairly intuitive; <d>elete,
> <t>ag, <v>iew attachments and so on.  And if you’ve used vi before, navigation
> isn’t that big a problem either.  The biggest problem is the entry barrier; you
> need to create an rc file, set up other programs for sending and receiving and
> some own shortcuts, e.g. for using a spam filter.  But I reckon it’s worth it.
> -- 
> Gruß | Greetings | Qapla'
> I forbid any use of my email addresses with Facebook services.
> 
> “I'm always right.
> This time I'm just even more right than usual.” – Linus Torvalds


I use mutt as an imap client to gmail. Gmail takes care of the filtering and
spam. Setup takes minutes.

Terry

Re: [gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[Alex Schuster]

Mick writes:

> ... or what the unbelievable lack of maturity of KDEPIM devs has landed us in:
> 
> I have upgraded KDE on my old laptop to see what gives.  Surprisingly, it was 
> not *too* bad; i.e. my old emails were not corrupted, deleted or otherwise 
> affected.

I am doing the same on my sister's PC. It doesn't work too well.

> However, the following are things that didn't really work as a rational human 
> being would expect with a PIM setup, let alone anyone who's running this in a 
> production environment with loads of users!
> 
> The auto-migration did not work.  It only worked partially for some mail 
> account settings, but did not leave behind a workable system, with half the 
> account settings missing.

I had a problem with mysql stuff missing, so Akonadi did not start and
the migration failed. I had to add the mysql USE flag to x11-libs/qt-sql.

> The kmail-migrator --interactive also did not work.

It refuses to start again with an already existing kmailrc.

> I had to change the location pointing to the local mail folders - I keep mine 
> under ~/Mail.  Then after pressing F5 on each folder akonadi scanned the 
> respective mail directory and my stored messages showed up!  :-)

You're lucky. I created a 'KMail Maildir' resource for the mail folder
that was used with KMail1 in KDE 3.5, and while the folder structure is
imported, I see no mails. Akonadi says it is syncing the folder I
clicked at, but it never finishes. When I drop a mail into a folder
(this workaround had been suggested to my on the KDE mailing list when I
did my own migration (and it worked)), I only see this mail, others
still do not show up.

Then I created a 'Maildir' resource. Some folders sync, but nothing
happens when I select the inbox. I restarted Akonadi, now there are some
13,000 thousand mails in the inbox, and I can view them. The other
folders get populated after pressing F5, but it takes long until they
are actually shown. And switching the folders takes some seconds.

So I started moving folders from the 'Maildir' resource to the default
'Local Folders' Resource. Rather than simply changing the 'Local
Folders' resource path to the Works, but the inbox has some 40,000
mails, and after over one hour only 4000 were copied to their
destination, so I logged out.
The next login, mysqld again eats 150 percent of the three CPU  cores,
and two akonadi_agent processes take another 100, the migration is still
happening. At a rate of < 100 Mails per minute. So it will probably take
 more than 7 hours until it's complete. I do not even know how to abort
this. I deleted the 'Maildir' resource, and the 'Local Folders'
resource, logged out an in again, and had to kill the mysqld process.
The 'Local Folders' resource is being recreated automatically by KMail2
I guess, finally I pointed its directory to the original Mail directory,
and things start to work. At least KDEPIM stuff, the rest of KDE still
has its problems.

> The migration of the email account Settings was even less successful.  The 
> settings for Sending transferred across, but the account settings for 
> Receiving did not survive.  Well, let me be more precise here.  They did 
> survive, as they were all still in the kmailrc file.  I checked this against a 
> back up.  No matter, they didn't show up under accounts.

Nothing of this has been auto-migrated here.

> The IMAP4 accounts were less of a success however.  I recreated them from 
> scratch, but no messages showed up under Inbox.  Sent and Trash work fine.

At least this is working.

> Having ran out of time I was wondering if you came across such breakages and 
> if so how did you fix them.

Personally, I have switched to Claws. It has its own issues, but that's
nothing compared to KMail2. But my sister is used to KMail, and so I try
to make it work for her.

> For now I have masked KDEPIM 4.7 on all of my remaining boxen.  This is too 
> messy to have to fix more than once, if I can fix it at all that is!
> 
> The only thing that's keeping me from mutt is the zillion shortcut commands 
> that I need to learn ... old dog/new tricks and all that.

Claws is okay, except that it does not work with maildirs, the is some
import script or something to convert this to mbox format.
Thunderbird also is a decent mail program.

	Wonko

Re: [gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[Mick]

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On Friday 30 Dec 2011 13:02:33 Alex Schuster wrote:
> Mick writes:

> > The auto-migration did not work.  It only worked partially for some mail
> > account settings, but did not leave behind a workable system, with half
> > the account settings missing.
> 
> I had a problem with mysql stuff missing, so Akonadi did not start and
> the migration failed. I had to add the mysql USE flag to x11-libs/qt-sql.

I am not using mysql.  I use sqlite3 which the KDE devs say it's not up to the 
job (can't handle the multi-threaded-access/read/write that mysql does).  So I 
have the sqlite USE flag enabled.  Akonadi and nepomuk started but never 
managed the migration.  No sqlite errors on the terminal that I started kmail 
from.

BTW, this is not a suggestion to use sqlite!  If you are happy to run a full 
blown mysql database on a desktop machine carry on with mysql or postgress.  I 
use mysql on a production box, because it's already running mysql for some 
other apps.  However, on this old laptop I'm using sqlite because this is an 
asthmatic PIII laptop with rather limited resources.  I don't need/want 
desktop semantic tagging, GUI search, or any of the new KDE design philosophy 
features and functions (find and egrep have served me nicely for years now, 
thank you).  Kmail 3.5 was fine, stable and relatively light footed.  It met 
perfectly my needs.  :-(


> > The kmail-migrator --interactive also did not work.
> 
> It refuses to start again with an already existing kmailrc.

You will need to restart the migration process.  For this you will need to 
shut down nepomuk and akonadi.  Then remove their respective config and db 
files.  Then restart them and fire up kmail afresh.  You'll have to be patient 
though, assuming the migration starts correctly this time.  Read more here:

http://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi_4.4/Troubleshooting

If not, then remove their files all the same, restart them and proceed to 
importing the mail directories from your Mail one at a time.

They are usually imported in a kmail-import.0 type of folder.  You can rename 
that, or select any subfolders and move them where you want them.

On every such physical move you will have to be patient.  Small subfolders 
will move and the akonadi with resync its tables within a few seconds, but 
larger folders with thousands of messages will take ages to complete.

After the whole import, sync, move, sync process has completed things will 
move smoother (only a few seconds delay when you open or access a large 
folder).


> > I had to change the location pointing to the local mail folders - I keep
> > mine under ~/Mail.  Then after pressing F5 on each folder akonadi
> > scanned the respective mail directory and my stored messages showed up! 
> > :-)
> 
> You're lucky. I created a 'KMail Maildir' resource for the mail folder
> that was used with KMail1 in KDE 3.5, and while the folder structure is
> imported, I see no mails. Akonadi says it is syncing the folder I
> clicked at, but it never finishes. When I drop a mail into a folder
> (this workaround had been suggested to my on the KDE mailing list when I
> did my own migration (and it worked)), I only see this mail, others
> still do not show up.

This is a game of patience.  It helps if you imagine sloooowly ringing the 
neck of those devs who released this half baked piece of C.R.A.P. on us.  
(Cannot Retail at Any Price).

I suggest you try one move at a time and then wait until it finishes.  
Completely.


> Then I created a 'Maildir' resource. Some folders sync, but nothing
> happens when I select the inbox. I restarted Akonadi, now there are some
> 13,000 thousand mails in the inbox, and I can view them. The other
> folders get populated after pressing F5, but it takes long until they
> are actually shown. And switching the folders takes some seconds.

Yes, there may be a couple of seconds delay between large folders, when kmail 
first starts.  Fewer seconds lag after the first time.


> So I started moving folders from the 'Maildir' resource to the default
> 'Local Folders' Resource. Rather than simply changing the 'Local
> Folders' resource path to the Works, but the inbox has some 40,000
> mails, and after over one hour only 4000 were copied to their
> destination, so I logged out.
> The next login, mysqld again eats 150 percent of the three CPU  cores,
> and two akonadi_agent processes take another 100, the migration is still
> happening. At a rate of < 100 Mails per minute. So it will probably take
>  more than 7 hours until it's complete. I do not even know how to abort
> this. I deleted the 'Maildir' resource, and the 'Local Folders'
> resource, logged out an in again, and had to kill the mysqld process.
> The 'Local Folders' resource is being recreated automatically by KMail2
> I guess, finally I pointed its directory to the original Mail directory,
> and things start to work. At least KDEPIM stuff, the rest of KDE still
> has its problems.

Not all of my maildir ~/Mail folders were picked up.  I had to import these 
manually as recommended in the Gentoo guide for the migration.


> > The migration of the email account Settings was even less successful. 
> > The settings for Sending transferred across, but the account settings
> > for Receiving did not survive.  Well, let me be more precise here.  They
> > did survive, as they were all still in the kmailrc file.  I checked this
> > against a back up.  No matter, they didn't show up under accounts.
> 
> Nothing of this has been auto-migrated here.
> 
> > The IMAP4 accounts were less of a success however.  I recreated them from
> > scratch, but no messages showed up under Inbox.  Sent and Trash work
> > fine.
> 
> At least this is working.
> 
> > Having ran out of time I was wondering if you came across such breakages
> > and if so how did you fix them.
> 
> Personally, I have switched to Claws. It has its own issues, but that's
> nothing compared to KMail2. But my sister is used to KMail, and so I try
> to make it work for her.

I recommend that you mask KDEPIM-4.7 with the packages kindly offered by the 
gentoo devs:  http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/desktop/kde/kdepim-4.7-mask.txt

I've upgraded KDE on two boxen, but masked KDEPIM-4.7 as recommended and had 
no problems so far.


> > For now I have masked KDEPIM 4.7 on all of my remaining boxen.  This is
> > too messy to have to fix more than once, if I can fix it at all that is!
> > 
> > The only thing that's keeping me from mutt is the zillion shortcut
> > commands that I need to learn ... old dog/new tricks and all that.
> 
> Claws is okay, except that it does not work with maildirs, the is some
> import script or something to convert this to mbox format.
> Thunderbird also is a decent mail program.

I have tried Claws (although I did not like mbox) and found myself cursing 
after every other key press.  I also tried T'bird and found it better than 
Claws, but worse than Kmail.  It's not just keyboard short cuts, but also how 
it integrates with the address book, pgp and s/mime, etc.

I started looking into getting used to mutt again.  Not sure how I can modify 
its shortcuts, because some them are not intuitive enough for me and some are 
duplicated/redundant.
-- 
Regards,
Mick

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Re: [gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[Michael Mol]

Mick wrote:
> On Friday 30 Dec 2011 13:02:33 Alex Schuster wrote:
>> Mick writes:
>>> For now I have masked KDEPIM 4.7 on all of my remaining boxen.  This is
>>> too messy to have to fix more than once, if I can fix it at all that is!
>>>
>>> The only thing that's keeping me from mutt is the zillion shortcut
>>> commands that I need to learn ... old dog/new tricks and all that.
>>
>> Claws is okay, except that it does not work with maildirs, the is some
>> import script or something to convert this to mbox format.
>> Thunderbird also is a decent mail program.
>
> I have tried Claws (although I did not like mbox) and found myself cursing
> after every other key press.  I also tried T'bird and found it better than
> Claws, but worse than Kmail.  It's not just keyboard short cuts, but also how
> it integrates with the address book, pgp and s/mime, etc.
>
> I started looking into getting used to mutt again.  Not sure how I can modify
> its shortcuts, because some them are not intuitive enough for me and some are
> duplicated/redundant.

On a Windows box where I need to be conscientious about memory usage, 
I've started using Seamonkey instead of Thunderbird+Chrome. If you can 
find Thunderbird tolerable, Seamonkey isn't far off. The browser side 
got some long-needed TLC earlier this year with the release of 2.5, so 
it's functional on the modern Internet. It still needs more work[1], but 
it handles most of my web needs, now.

I haven't tried it on Gentoo yet, and I don't know if or when I will; 
none of my Gentoo boxes (four out of eight! Whee!) are low on memory yet.

It also comes with an "address book" component that's somehow viewed on 
the same tier as its browser, email, calendar and IRC client 
component[2]...I'd guess it's worth a try, at least.

[1] It's got some issues with blocking the UI thread on things that 
should be background operations, and it has some weird glitches when I 
load up GMail--which I only do for my address book there...

[2] Seamonkey is the descendant of the old Mozilla suite. The IRC client 
is still called "Chatzilla". Perhaps there's a way to turn off the 
components you don't need in the ebuild.

Re: [gentoo-user] The mess that's called KDEPIM 4.7 ...

[Alan McKinnon]

On Fri, 30 Dec 2011 14:02:33 +0100
Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org> wrote:

> > The only thing that's keeping me from mutt is the zillion shortcut
> > commands that I need to learn ... old dog/new tricks and all that.  
> 
> Claws is okay, except that it does not work with maildirs, the is some
> import script or something to convert this to mbox format.
> Thunderbird also is a decent mail program.

I run an imap server (dovecot) locally to deal with that. It knows what
regular maildirs are and uses them. The main benefit is when changing
mail clients, NO migration is needed. Just point the new client at
localhost:143, and voila!

-- 
Alan McKinnnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com