Kmail rant

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Kmail rant

Postby varrin » Sep 13th, '19, 19:38

Y'all,

I am well aware this isn't a complaint about Mageia. In fact, I love Mageia!. My biggest disappointment specifically about Mageia at the moment is the adverse impact of its relative decline in popularity compared to other distributions.

But Kmail... the bane of my existence.

The problem is this: Kmail is the best email software I can find. When it works, it's fabulous. And it *used* to work really super well. It was completely functional and the back end (maildir and all) worked perfectly. Enter Akonadi. What a colossal piece of trash. And now Kmail requires Akonadi to function at all.

Thankfully, my data files are still there. The file system handles it just as a robust linux file system should. Dolphin can spit out the answer to what I'm dealing with in a few short seconds: 273725 files in 244 sub folders taking up 18.3 gigs of space. Kmail (more specifically Akonadi) on the other hand can't. In fact, letting it run *overnight* isn't enough.

Yesterday, I upgraded from MGA6 (which was problematic *only* because of this awful Kmail+Akonadi arrangement) to MGA7. The upgrade itself went great. Then I loaded Kmail. Don't know why, but it seems like it had to think real hard about all my email again. I let it crunch over night. It never finished. Logging out and back in stops the CPU/disk usage, and I've had mixed results getting my inbox to load (It did finally load at one point). I thought maybe I should unload some emails out of it, so I created a new folder to move more old emails into. I tried moving a few thousand emails into that folder. It choked. On 500. It didn't even make it to 1000.

What utter destruction of the formerly best email program for Linux. I've complained about this before but it seems there are no good solutions. Again, I know this isn't a Mageia problem and I should probably go complain at the Kmail team, but I do wonder if any of you have any leads on another solution? Is there an email program that supports maildir and will run with more than a few thousand (or hundreds of thousands of) emails? I don't think that's asking to much, really.

Sorry for the rant. Thanks for letting me put these bits here.

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Re: Kmail rant

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 15th, '19, 03:49

varrin wrote:Dolphin can spit out the answer to what I'm dealing with in a few short seconds: 273725 files in 244 sub folders taking up 18.3 gigs of space. Kmail (more specifically Akonadi) on the other hand can't. In fact, letting it run *overnight* isn't enough.

Those 18.3 GB are only your mails or your whole home directory ?

FWIW, I'm using my same thunderbird profile since I started using it 14 years ago. It has several hundred thousand mails but it's only a few GB in size.
When I'm back at my Mageia box I can give you some details. In the meantime, my hint would be to ask upstream on how to best handle this, check https://forum.kde.org/viewforum.php?f=20 or https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kdepim-users/


Maybe use a freshly created user, and there try to import your current kmail profile and all data, and then export from there ?
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Re: Kmail rant

Postby banjo » Sep 15th, '19, 16:22

Kmail did the same thing to me a number of years ago. I could not make it work so eventually bailed out and went to Thunderbird. So far, Thunderbird has been working well for me.

It took a while to transition because Tbird uses Mbox, so I had to translate the Maildir format into Mbox format. I don't remember exactly how I did that but I could look it up.

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Re: Kmail rant

Postby varrin » Sep 15th, '19, 21:43

doktor5000 wrote:Those 18.3 GB are only your mails or your whole home directory ?


That's the emails. Home is...... larger... :)

I did rant on the KDE forum, too. I know it's annoying. I really shouldn't complain about all this fantastic software. Nobody wants their pet project insulted. I get it. I'm just frustrated, and would love it if things were better (never mind how good they really are, all things considered).

... thunderbird ...


I looked at Thunderbird a few years ago. Maildir support was brand new, or maybe not yet implemented. I'm very reluctant to switch from maildir to any other format. Maybe I should see if Thunderbird+maildir ever got put together properly?

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Re: Kmail rant

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 15th, '19, 22:26

varrin wrote:I did rant on the KDE forum, too. I know it's annoying. I really shouldn't complain about all this fantastic software. Nobody wants their pet project insulted. I get it.

I didn't say to rant about it, that usually doesn't help anyone. Ask upstream for help or at least their approach / experiences and how to go about such an issue.

varrin wrote:I looked at Thunderbird a few years ago. Maildir support was brand new, or maybe not yet implemented. I'm very reluctant to switch from maildir to any other format. Maybe I should see if Thunderbird+maildir ever got put together

You don't have to use the mails in their native current format, but rather import those. Apart from that maildir support is present.
See e.g. https://ma.juii.net/blog/kmail-to-thunderbird on how to import your mails from kmail.
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Re: Kmail rant

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 16th, '19, 13:44

doktor5000 wrote:FWIW, I'm using my same thunderbird profile since I started using it 14 years ago. It has several hundred thousand mails but it's only a few GB in size.
When I'm back at my Mageia box I can give you some details.

As a followup, it's 5GB in size with 850 files and 163 subfolders. Can't seem to get the overall number of mails including archived ones but it's at least 300k, from a quick glance.
But I also did some regular maintenance over the years (compacting).
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Re: Kmail rant

Postby varrin » Sep 16th, '19, 15:25

One of my aversions to mbox is giant files with lots of emails in each large file. With maildir, each email is in its own text file, easily readable by any text editor. I can sort in a file manager (on any OS) by date and have an in-order listing of emails which I can open with any text editor. Apply plain-text search to the directory and I can see the contents easily. Backups are quite simple and don't depend on any OS or email program to access the data. "Compacting" isn't a thing with maildir. In the absence of an email program to manipulate the data, just copy the files to another directory and/or delete the ones you don't want. Very very simple, and completely accessible to the file system. Not so with mbox.

I do know that ranting doesn't help in the traditional sense. But I do think it's important for the development team to know that a problem exists. And the problem is widespread with Akonadi (It's really the requirement for Akonadi that is the problem; Kmail worked great without Akonadi). I imagine they're aware that it *was* a problem and maybe think all is well or that the problems that crop up these days are isolated. In as much as a 'rant' can show that, 1) the underlying problem is not fixed, and 2) the problems are not isolated, I think it might be beneficial. But maybe it will fall on deaf ears. If so, I guess I need to look for a new email application. :(

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Re: Kmail rant

Postby doktor5000 » Sep 16th, '19, 15:37

Well, format of the actual stored mails doesn't really matter to me. I have a global fulltext search that is reasonable fast, backups are also quite simple, just copy the whole ~/.thunderbird somewhere else and be done.

For the rant, as long as you don't provide something that is actually reproducible, or ruled out that it is a local configuration issue or with our downstream Akonadi builds maybe, I think just a rant will fall on deaf ears.
Why would someone pay attention to that, if the same program is working just fine for them, and you don't add enough details or clear steps to reproduce or to at least find the underlying issue?
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Re: Kmail rant

Postby JoesCat » Sep 19th, '19, 08:39

I've also got a large Kmail setup and have also have held-off on upgrading (from Kmail1, last version allowed to still "not" need Akonadi) to a more recent KMail2.

In terms of your crashes: https://userbase.kde.org/KMail/FAQs_Hin ... k-around_2 ..."Often, a few restarts seem to be needed."...

I did some reading a little while ago, and one of the Kmail maintainers was mentioning good results with Postgre, but maybe it was testing another backend as an option. I don't know. Having read that, it presents an opportunity to try another backend. This seems to be a good read comparing 3 different backends.
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/ ... nt-systems
As per the article, both Postgre and SQLite are ACID-compliant, and can do multiple threads but SQLite can only write one thread at a time, however SQLite does seem to have better (8byte) integers, which could probably be more important for huge databases.

This link: https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread. ... -very-slow
is informative as it links to this:
http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/c ... DME.Debian
which gives info on setting-up the 3 different types of backend
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Re: Kmail rant

Postby JoesCat » Oct 6th, '19, 02:51

Found some more info. It's a short read, Kmail1 vs Kmail2: https://lwn.net/Articles/469124/
Basically, the front-end of Kmail is about the same, and the reasoning for the database backend was to reduce a lot of KDE library code duplication in terms of data, reading, writing, storage. Also mentions here that you need something more thread ready than SQLite, so your choices seem to be now just MariaDB or Postgres.

There was also a reddit article where someone mentions that Kmail was fine, until they got into another job posting that had heavy mail usage, and at that point, you could see the backend database is falling-over.
https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/8 ... _thoughts/
"Kmail really doesn't like receiving a lot of mails, and literally can't open mail being too heavy."

and another article on database backends: https://opensource.com/article/19/1/ope ... -databases
SQLite is ok for lite databases, but not enough for KMail, MariaDB is ok for small databases but for large data (like your 18GB Kmail cache), probably needs postgres with multithreading.
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