Kmail2 mini rant

[varrin]

I'm back for another try at Mageia. The good news is this: I installed 2-beta3 on a new machine and *everything* (hardware wise) worked perfectly right out of the box. Install was perfect and, get this, 8 times faster than the subsequent Windows reinstall. Mega kudos to the Mageia team. I'm *very* impressed.

Windows was my big frustration of the day....... until.... I started to work on Kmail. What a total epic failure of a disaster that is. Am I the only one here who is infuriated at the incompetence of the Kmail team? I've been using Kmail for a decade now and this is simply intolerable. The upgrade failed (from a 1.x dataset). A fresh install and import *failed* (akonadi is still crunching downstairs after hours). I'm a real regular user, but not a moron. I've got a decade of Linux experience, almost all of it Mandrake > Mandriva > now Mageia and virtually all of it KDE. But I'm not just a tinkerer. I actually *use* this stuff. As in work, business, everything. Amidst what is arguably the very best KDE/Linux experience I've ever had, now comes arguably the worst and most important major application failure I've had. Whose neck ought to be wrung for destroying Kmail?

Okay, so with that rant behind me, I'd like to be most productive in a minimum amount of time:

1: Is there any reason for me to hold out hope for Kmail 2 to become usable... ever?

2: If not, is there some way we can get an old Kmail (pre-akonadi) working with Mageia 2? An ideal solution would be an RPM tucked away somewhere (kmail-old-1.good.version.number.mga)

3: If not, I'm open to hearing recommendations for KDE mail clients that would be suitable replacements. FWIW, GPG integration is a requirement.

Dontcha just hate whiners like me???

V-

[isadora]

Just one advice: went through many issues with KMail myself, until i decided to switch over to Mozilla Thunderbird.
Great add-ons as well as great PGP-integration with Enigmail.

[djennings]

I recently did an install of Mageia 2 RC on a low end computer (2.2GB AMD 512MB RAM) which was previously running Mandriva 2008.1 with good old KDE 3.5.10
At first I was very impressed with how fast it ran on Mageia 2 with KDE 4. It was actually quite good.

Then I realised Kmail was not installed. Installing Kmail pulled in 80 other packages with it including akonadi and nepomuk, and then the computer ground to a halt. After leaving it a day to see if it would be better once everything was indexed it was just as bad.

I have now uninstalled kmail,akonadi,nepomuk and all the other junk and replaced it with Thunderbird, and now the computer is running perfectly.

[zugunder]

Damn you guys all, you're just breaking my heart ! Kmail is one of the few applications that have been keeping me stuck to KDE4 for years, and now... Are the things really so bad with Kmail2? I'd better check with it on kde.org and couple of forums before (and if) I switch to Mageia2 with KDE. Anyway, thanks for a warning...

[djennings]

Damn you guys all, you're just breaking my heart ! Kmail is one of the few applications that have been keeping me stuck to KDE4 for years, and now... Are the things really so bad with Kmail2? I'd better check with it on kde.org and couple of forums before (and if) I switch to Mageia2 with KDE. Anyway, thanks for a warning...

Bear in mind my experience was on a low end machine which would have struggled with any of the previous versions of KDE4.x The positive news about Mageia 2 is that KDE4.8 is now good enough to run on low end computers so long as you do not use akonadi/nepomuk/kmail.

As for using Kmail on faster computers I have tried it twice now, and each time I have struggled to get IMAP accounts set up, but once they work, they seem to work OK.

[zugunder]

Well, my system is not that old, but it is still a cheap laptop... So I am mostly concerned about something useless running in the background and consuming CPU and eating battery power. As of now I have Nepomuk&Strigi turned off, but Akonadi is running (and showing almost a dozen of active processes in System Monitor). I heard that in the latest KDE Kmail and all Akonadi-related things are integrated much stronger, so wouldn't it happen that only to run Kmail I'll have to have running a bunch of additional services?

[varrin]

I thought I ought to supply an update after that demoralizing rant. The short version is this: I'm not any happier overall, but I did manage to get Kmail working... sort of...

The machine is for my wife, but we both are long-time Kmail users. She has far less email stored than I do (maybe 30,000 v.s. about 200,000). Automatic migration failed. I did a manual migration using a combination of these things:

http://userbase.kde.org/KMail/FAQs_Hint ... _migration
https://wiki.kubuntu.org/OneiricOcelot/ ... ntu/Kmail2

The manual migration was a disaster, too. I went through her email and asked her what she *really* needed. I filtered out about 20,000 messages in a few directories (moving them elsewhere). Then, I did the first parts of a manual migration (deleting the akonadi data and restarting the server) but did *not* do a kmail-migrator manual migration again. Instead I simply added another resource using the local directory Kmail (maildir) format and pointed it to the old mail. That still took some time (moving from folder to folder and waiting for it to read all the data), but it was ultimately successful. I chose to do this instead of moving the existing data to preserve the separate structure in case of a catastrophe. Not sure if that was wise or not, but it's working anyway.

Now that it is working, sort of, I can confirm that it is quite buggy, kludgy, and otherwise vastly inferior to prior versions.

Along the way I did some research and concluded that the best option for those using maildir for storage would be to simply wait until Thunderbird can handle maildir. Thunderbird 12 now has the backend work implemented to handle pluggable storage types and the prototype was a "maildir-like" system, though not an actual implementation of maildir. I suspect it would work in the mean time. The latest Tbird in the repos (that I can see) is 10.

As a result of all this, I am going to have wait to upgrade my own machine to Mageia 2 (from Mandriva 2010). I don't want to switch to mbox (major step backwards) which rules out Tbird <12, and Kmail doesn't look like it will even function with the quantity of email I have (yes, I do use it from time to time). Major tragedy, especially because I *really* like everything else in Mageia 2. Unfortunately, this is a deal killer.

Does anyone here know if it's possible to run Kmail 1 with KDE4.8? If so, would such a thing ever be made available in the repos?

V-

[jamesc]

As a result of all this, I am going to have wait to upgrade my own machine to Mageia 2 (from Mandriva 2010). I don't want to switch to mbox (major step backwards) which rules out Tbird <12, and Kmail doesn't look like it will even function with the quantity of email I have (yes, I do use it from time to time). Major tragedy, especially because I *really* like everything else in Mageia 2. Unfortunately, this is a deal killer.

Same here.

I've used KMail since I first switched to Linux with Mandrake 9.2 (I think) and loved it. I rsync my laptop to home regularly and the maildir format makes this nice and easy and fast. I have about 11G of mail from as far back as 1995 contained within KMail which, yes, sometimes I need to get to, but before even reading my mail I can't get KMail2 to filter my messages, put incoming messages where I want them or remove duplicates when asked.

And I haven't even got as far as trying to use it to read or send mail.

I took a look at claws-mail but that doesn't really appeal. I've heard great things about Thunderbird but the maildir/mbox issue gives me cause for concern as I'm going to have huge file transfers when I back up to home. Any other ideas?

I am in the process of importing my email from the backup I took before moving to Mageia 2 (rather than trying to add ~/.Mail as a local resource) to see whether that's any better, but I'm starting to think that in the time I've spent faffing trying to get it to work I'd have been able to reinstall 1 and have working email.

If it ain't broke...

[jamesc]

In the end this is what I decided to do: go back to Mageia 1.

I can now read my mail again (hurrah!). I suspect converting my maildirs to mboxes and using Thunderbird is the way to go; but I feel happier doing that from 1 and then upgrading to 2 than trying to fix it in 2.

[doktor5000]

Use whatever works best for you

[appletux]

Kmail2 works perfectly for me....

[jamesc]

There was a discussion about this in #mageia yesterday and we came up with some ideas:

If you only need to be able to refer to old mails - rather than reply - move the maildirs containing them somewhere away from Kmail and use a console-based MUA like mutt to access them when necessary. That will reduce just how much work Akonadi and KMail2 need to do to keep track of all your messages. And as you archive you can just move stuff to your 'new' archive folder. This is also good for rsync.

Also, if you have 1 with a working KMail, you can create new folders in KMail and set them to be stored in mbox format. You can then copy or move your existing mail stash into the mbox folder and use this as the basis of a migration to Thunderbird any other MUA of choice.

It also occurred to me that a lot of the lag and overheads I experienced with KMail2 are due to my encrypted home partition. Not sure how true this is, though.

[doktor5000]

It also occurred to me that a lot of the lag and overheads I experienced with KMail2 are due to my encrypted home partition. Not sure how true this is, though.

It may well be the cause. At work we need to use full disc encryption via LUKS, and it nearly costs something between 30-50% of system performance and also some disk throughput. Combine that with a traditional harddisk and you got a dead slow box, compared to an unencrpyted system sporting some current SSD.