For many years I used fetchmail and postfix with their default settings. fetchmail would put incoming mail into /var/spool/mail/karl. Kmail would load data from local mbox file ** /var/spool/mail/karl** and from a local Kmail mail folder at ~/.local/share/local-mail. That worked with Kmail being a standalone application. But Kmail switching to akonadi caused severe annoyances and I already l looked for a replacement of Kmail. Switching from mbox type /var/spool/mail/karl to mail-dir type /home/karl/.local/share/local-mail/ and deleting the mbox account solved the problem:
On some occasions akonadi starts heavy writing to disk and contributing a significant fraction to cpu load of a i7 6700K. Even deleting akonadi storage .local/share/akonadi won’t fix this. Deletion of the following configuration data fixed the problem:
karl@erlangen:~> ll .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi*changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 21:56 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_akonotes_resource_0_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 21:56 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_archivemail_agent_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 21:56 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_birthdays_resource_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 21:56 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_contacts_resource_0_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 16:22 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_followupreminder_agent_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 21:56 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_ical_resource_0_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 16:22 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_indexing_agent_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 28. Feb 06:43 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_maildir_resource_0_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 21:56 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_maildispatcher_agent_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 16:22 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_mailfilter_agent_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 21:56 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_migration_agent_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 16:22 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_newmailnotifier_agent_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 21:56 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_notes_agent_changes.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 karl users 16 27. Feb 16:22 .config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_sendlater_agent_changes.dat
karl@erlangen:~>
Adding an existing directory as a KMail local folder account can be a frustrating experience. For achieving reproducible results the following procedure was found to work reliably:
rename the folder to be added: mv Mail Mail.renamed
create a new local folder account in Kmail with new folder Mail
quit Kmail and stop akonadi; verify all processes are terminated using ps ux|grep kmail
and ps ux|grep akonadi - copy from renamed folder: * rsync -a Mail.renamed/ Mail/*
While adding folder Mail directly using KMail failed on many occasions the above procedure worked reliably.
On some occasions the indexer starts to fail on some folder and tries again after 5 seconds flooding the journal with the folliwing messages:
.....
Feb 15 09:19:47 erlangen akonadiserver[2472]: org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: ItemRetrievalJob for request 0x7f3a04043c30 finished
Feb 15 09:19:52 erlangen akonadiserver[2472]: org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: ItemRetrievalJob for request 0x7f3a04020df0 finished
Feb 15 09:19:57 erlangen akonadiserver[2472]: org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: ItemRetrievalJob for request 0x7f3a04024990 finished
Feb 15 09:20:02 erlangen akonadiserver[2472]: org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: ItemRetrievalJob for request 0x7f3a04024990 finished
Feb 15 09:20:07 erlangen akonadiserver[2472]: org.kde.pim.akonadiserver: ItemRetrievalJob for request 0x7f3a04024990 finished
....
.
To stop the above behavior create a temporary folder and move the messages of the offending folder identified by akonadiconsole to the new folder and back to the original one.
Actually most of the annoying malfunctions of kmail have been fixed. The remaining one I encountered is with the indexer choking on 8-bit characters. The pertaining message fragments are easily identified in the message list as ‘unknown subject’, ‘unknown sender’ … and can safely be deleted. So for most accounts kmail works as advertised. Search of kmail2 5.13.2 (19.12.2) is really fast.