I been using kmail 1.13.6 (kmail 4.4.10 locked down in openSUSE 12.2) because I had reliability and conversion issues when I first tried moving to kmail2. I think I’ve now solved any remaining conversion issues by converting all mbox files to maildir folders, and them importing them into kmail 4.8.5 using Import-Kmail-folder-hierarchy
Before I really cut over to the latest kmail, I would like to know if users find it stable and reliable. People seemed to be reporting quite a few problems last year. What is the situation now?
I have more than 50,000 messages spread over dozens of folders. So far I’ve been experimenting in a vbox environment, and kmail2 does seem slow, hopefully it will be better on real hardware. Anyone have any experience with kmail2 with large quantities of email?
There is no urgency, I can wait for kmail in 12.3 if that would be a big improvement.
While it seems to be stable, it does not check mail on startup, even though I have that option enabled in the settings. I was working in, I think kde 4.8.4 though. Also I am having the same problem described in the post at https://forums.opensuse.org/english/get-technical-help-here/applications/484420-kmail-trash-folder.html Can anyone please help with this?? I am running openSUSE 12.3 with KDE version 4.10 (64-bit).
I have just this evening upgraded to kmail2 (after upgrading to 12.3 yesterday). Prior to doing so I backed up my entire home folder. I had previously converted all mbox files to MailDir folder format (I think some old mbox files were the cause of previous failed attempts at kmail2 conversions). Initially I had some trouble due to not logging out before starting the new kmail2 - I had to restore the home folder and started a fresh login. Once properly running, Kmail2 correctly converted all my folders.
I then enabled kwallet. Set kwallet to have a blank password and changed the kwallet settings to ask questions as little as possible. I think an old wallet was causing problems, so I had to remove all wallets - some setting change or running kmail then seemed to create a new one. Having done all this kmail asked me to re-enter some of my account passwords and was able to receive and send mail.
I also enabled a limited nepomuk without full file searching because it seemed to be required for searching emails (not sure why).
All filters have been lost, but I can live with that.
Things seem stable for the past two hours. I don’t really like the complexity of kmail/kwallet/akonadi/nepomuk. I have for years now attempted to avoid kwallet and nepomuk, but by going with the flow I hope to reduce the amount of customisation I have to maintain across upgrades. If it is too unstable/anoying I will be able to salvage the MailDir folders and move to some other solution.
I might of fixed the kmail not checking mail on startup. I enabled the system tray icon for kmail, restarted the PC and then it asked me for my email password and checked the mail. I do not have the kwallet feature enabled though, and did not need to when it was working in previous versions of kde (without the system tray icon being enabled). So I am at a loss to explain what exactly is going on there. Just to be clear Kmail is sending and receiving my mail, it just would not check at startup, even with the option enabled. But would check every 5mins (with interval checking enabled). So once again at a loss to explain. Good luck with it! :sarcastic:
Using kmail-4.10.1-384.1.x86_64
Last summer I moved to kmail. Though I’ve seen issues here in the forums, I’ve had no issues myself, except for a malconfiguration of one account, which I reconfigured OK. In my situation kmail does check on startup. I know I set it somewhere, don’t have the time right now to dig in deeper. All in all I’m a very satisfied Kontact-suite user.
Call me a noob! But it was my first time using K-mail yesterday and I didn’t like it so I downloaded thunderbird and “deleted” the account in the K-mail.
Today I found thunderbird could never get any mail from that account. Now I went to the web page of my mail service.
All my mails were deleted by my clicking on my account in K-Mail!!
Thank god that mail is my secondary mail and loss may be tolerated. The most epic fail I’ve done with use of computer!!
I must admit that that kmail2 has lived up to my expectations. I had a problem with akonadi consuming CPU. Akonadi is described as a cache for nepomuk and on googling some suggested just removing the akonadi data and starting again - bad move - on removing the data, all email is lost because all email metadata is lost. So I had to go to backup, lose email from last night and start the conversion from scratch. Admittedly I shot myself in the foot - but this does underscore the complexity of the kmail system.
Another thing that confused me that was everyone seemed to be saying email would now be stored under .local somewhere. But in the case of my old folders they seem to be retained under my old Mail folder (except possibly for inbox and other special folders).
I don’t really want to read up on kmail internals, but in order to be able to properly maintain my email I think I’m going to have to.
Having gone to backup, converted from scratch, I’m now back to akonadi burning one of the CPU’s. I shall persist with this for a while and see it I can smooth it all out and fallback to kmail1 if it gets too painful.
On attempting to search my kmail inbox using “Tools->Find Messages” I get
Can not get search result. Only resources can modify remote identifiers
I suspect the conversion process must have busted something because it’s hard to believe search would fail - but perhaps it’s a nepomuk setting issue (I’ve enabled Email Indexer, but not File Indexer for example). Investigations continue.
I am using 4.10.1 Kmail in Kontakt. Although the overall usability has gotten better it is still quite far from the quality it had under KDE3.
mail filter do not work correctly and mailing lists are sometimes correctly filtered…sometimes not.
when receiving mails with encryption, neither the encryption status is correctly indicated nor does the graphical representation of the good graphical signature work.
offline working with mails in akonadi does substantially not work. You have, even if you want to work offline, set to online in order to access your mail.
if you use “local folders” they may cause problems when archiving the mails. Archiving fails with 1 message = all archiving process will fail. The program will not give you hints why the archiving failed.
mail is not checked automatically on login, but after the given interval (e.g. if set to check every 5 minutes, it will check only AFTER 5 minutes). It will however ask for the wallet password at once.
the PIM components are better but somehow inconsistent. If you import your contacts from a vcf file then many of your contacts that have the birthday field empty will suddenly have a “fantasma” birthday being attributed the birthday date of other contacts. So a hotel will suddenly have a birthday or about 20 of your casual professional contacts will get 50 years old, the very same day.
kgpg integration does not work well, I had problems with users using mac and enigmail.
messages may vanish from the sent folder. They vanish forever and without error message. I guess you have to live with this. But it is random, so troublesome to find indication on what actually happens.
preferences in encryption for contacts are ignored and messages sent unencrypted without warning (you have nothing to hide, right) and fantasy contacts are created if you indicate a encryption preference at time of sending.
There are some progress:
the interface is more stable and the PIM has now feature completeness compared to KDE3. But I would be doubtful if professional, mission critical use is currently indicated. And more is to come. Wallet will change to “secretsservice”. I am looking forward to all the nice “achievements” we will experience.
Still I do not like thunderbird as interface and I like desktop integration. So I stick with Kontakt and hope… one needs patience. And have to have good backups.
P.S. and the search function for messages in kmail is quite broken, known issue, slows down nepomuk terminally but this can be worked around be deactivating it.
if you were using imap then deleting an account in kmail would not delete the emails on the server. If it has done so then you have done something majorly wrong.
If you were using pop then deleting the account will of course delete all your emails - but this has nothing to do with kmail - exactly the same thing would have happened in thunderbird.
Stakanov’s summaryis the kind of info I was seeking when starting this post. It was timely because filters seemed to have stopped working on incoming mail.
I think my conclusion is that the supporting services are not stable, not well document, and lack good processes for sanity-checking and recovery. The tightly woven interdependencies are in my eyes a bad design decision. At some point in the history of KDE, the semantic desktop was supposed to be optional, and given the minimal functional differences between kmail1/kmail2 it would have been nice if kmail2 had supported an optional approach (with reduced functionality). Over time I guess the interdependencies and services will improve and be made rock-solid, but this does not yet seem to be the case.
I converted my existing KDE3 kmail to kmail2 by using the automatic conversion. Maybe if I had started with a clean slate things would be different. But having spent some time experimenting with 12.2/12.3 kmail2 in a VM, and further time on my 12.3 upgraded desktop, I think I’ve had enough and will back away from kmail2 for the time being.
As I understand it my inbox and mail should be somewhere under /home/michael/./local/share/local-mail, but it’s all still in /home/michael/Mail, including the inbox.
In a wise move openSUSE provide a /opt/kde3 set of packages that includes kdepim3-3.5.10. I ran the old KDE3 kmail and it seems to still be able to find everything it needs in my Mail directory - it doesn’t know what was read recently, but otherwise all seems well. I think I will move in that direction. I took a look at Thunderbird (converted to mbox), but I think KDE3 kmail is more familiar and will do for now.
Moving back has the added advantage that I can disable nepomuk.
I considered moving all my mail into imap, but setting up imap to work around kmail2 doesn’t seem sensible, and maybe that would be a new can of worms.
Kmail2 does look nice, some of the presentation changes on the main screen are quite nice, it’s not all bad.
