Kmail 2.8.: 'Find messages' won't work

[mab33]

(Using KMail 2.8.2 in a fully-updated 64-bit Mageia-2 Beta3)

Overall I'm very pleased with KMail, especially how well it maps Local Folders onto an existing maildir email set (/kmail/mail).

But I've just struck an unexpected problem with Find Messages:

When I try to Find Messages whose e.g. headers (or whole message) contain a certain string, the Find fails:

""Cannot get search result. Unknown error. Only resources can modify remote identifiers."

What on earth is that all about?! Surely a Find is not modifying anything?

Unless someone can provide a solution soon I shall be reporting this as a bug...

HELP!

[akolychkine]

I've seen that bug too in Mageia 2 rc. But after restarting the application, it could search again. Have no idea.

[mab33]

(Using KMail 2.8.2 in a fully-updated 64-bit Mageia-2 Beta3)

Oops! That should hav e read KMail 4.8.2, of course...

[mab33]

SInce I first reported that "Only resources can modify remote identifiers" error has not recurred.
However, Find Messages is in other respects so broken as to be unusable.

First, it does not work as expected on 'To' or 'From' fields. For example, if one has been sending emails to 'fredsmith@some.where', it will not find any of them in Sent-mail if a substring is used as the search argument (e.g. "fredsm" or "dsmith" or "some" or "where.
However, it will find SOME of them if "fredsmith" or "some.where" was the search argument.
In other words, it is only searching on 'left-hand-side-of-@" or "right-hand-side-of-@" equal to search argument.
Even then, it fails to find ALL of the occurrences.

For example, a Find in 'Sent-mail' for "gmail.com" finds only 11 emails:

5 'this week'
4 in 2004
1 in 2005
1 last week

whereas the same search on the same Sent-mail directory using KDE 4.5.2's KMail found 395 matches!

So Find Messages is truly 'work in progress', and cannot be relied upon to return correct results - if any.

Because of that I am unable to use KMail 4.8.2 on a regular basis, so I am - regretfully - postponing my intended move over to Mageia until a version of KMail with a working Find Messages is available.
As KMail 4.8.3 does not solve the problem either, it may be not until KMail 4.9 comes along in August before I shall be able to return to Mageia - something I was looking forward to, as I think it's a great distro!

N.B. There are in fact 2 bug reports on subject:

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=281227
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=299840

but there seems to be no action taking place in there (apart from the comments I have added.)

I shall miss Mageia, and hope Autumn will see the solution to this problem.

[isadora]

Very sorry to hear about your experiences with KMail.
Have been a KMail-user myself for many many years.
That is, until some time when first problems appeared, and lots of hours were spent.

At last i decided, to switch over to Mozilla's Thunderbird, which perfectly suited my needs.

Sorry, can't give you any other advise, but hope to keep you around.

[mab33]

I also have taken a look at Thunderbird (and Evolution!).

The reason I have not changed to T'Bird is that it doesn't yet support Maildir, which is the form in which my last 8 year's of email are stored.
(Maildir also offers superior backup/cloning, via rsync.)

However, I understand T'Bird 12 provides a Maildir option, though the GUI is not there yet to facilitate its configuration.
So unless Kmail's Find Messages is rectified soon I guess I may be moving over to T'Bird.
But I'm very fond of KMail, and 4.8.2 does work very well - apart from Find Messages, that is - so will give it a chance...

As for Evolution, it has some nice features, but is too idiosyncratic in its email importing/mapping facilities*- and lack of flexibility - for me.
(* For example, if I hand over a copy of my /kmail/mail directory to it, it extracts all the subdirectories into its own folders but ignores the Inbox completely! It also has a messy display of the various folders.)

[doktor5000]

For maildir import, seems there are many ways to import or convert it first so thunderbird can use it. Maybe you want to have a look at
http://yergler.net/projects/one-off/maildir-to-mbox/ or better the updated one http://yergler.net/blog/2010/06/06/batt ... box-again/
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Importing_and ... _your_mail
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4780 ... dir-format

[mab33]

For maildir import, seems there are many ways to import or convert it first so thunderbird can use it.

Yes, I know, but the point I was trying to make is that I want to keep my email in maildir form (for purposes of efficient backup/cloning via rsync).

[doktor5000]

As rsync only transfers differentials between files, there's no difference whether you're using many small files or one big file, so where's your point? Mind to provide some more details what you mean with more efficiency?

Or just get Thunderbird 12 from Mozilla at http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla ... 686/en-US/
then import your maildir stuff in a new profile, and then use

Code: Select all

time your_rsync_comman_here

to take the time used to backup both versions of the profile, one in mbox format and one in maildir format. That way you have actual hard values.

[mab33]

As rsync only transfers differentials between files, there's no difference whether you're using many small files or one big file, so where's your point? Mind to provide some more details what you mean with more efficiency?

See extract from a discussion in an Ubuntu forum: ('Differentials' only over 'the net')

"On Tue, 2008-06-10 at 10:33 -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote:
> But when I did it to copy files as backups from my hard disk to an
> external drive, it would copy the whole file; so if I have a 5 gig
> tarfile, it copies the 5 gig over.

> I thought from the docs that if the 5 gig file was something that just
> had a portion altered, like a 10 meg chunk, that 10 meg would get copied
> over to the appropriate section of the destination 5 gig file. But no, 5
> gig gets copied because it had a difference.

The default for local copies is "whole files" (the -W or --whole-file
option). You can turn this off for local copies by specifying the
--no-W option.** See the man page for details.

** It should be pointed out that running the differential algorithm locally
may in fact take longer than just copying the whole file."

[doktor5000]

Well, you shouldn't use the defaults anyway, as you don't want to do whole-file backups but incremental/differential ones. I still don't know what you mean by difference in efficiency ...
As i said, you'll only know for yourself if you do direct comparison. Nothing beats hard numbers.