I’m having some difficulty importing old email to the new email that comes with 42.2 I’ve tried using the PIM Setting exporter without success. First, my old emails are in KDEPIM3 format, since I have been using the kDE3 version of KMail. I copied the file .kde/share/apps/kmail/mail over to the 42.2 computer. Then I tried to use the PIM Setting Exporter with file/import data. I unselected all, then selected mails. Then I selected the mail file which holds all the old mail folders but it doesn’t start to download the old email. What am I not doing, or doing wrong?
I have a couple of ideas on how to fix this.
One Install say 13.2 on another computer and try to import the mail files from KDEPIM3. Then archive KDEPIM 4 and see if KDEPIM5 will copy over the emails.
Two - See if I can copy the files to ,say, Thunderbird, and then see if I can import the email into KDEPIM5.
Thoughts or suggestions, anyone.
Looking at the KDE4 Plasma KMail Version 4.14.10 on this 13.2 system, the KMail automatic archiver is producing bzip2 compressed data containing files which are SMTP mail, ASCII text. These archive files import into the Leap 42.2 KDE Plasma 5 KMail client without any issues.
What you could try is, after stopping the Leap 42.2 KMail client and Akonadi, to simply copy the KDE3 mail directories and files over to the location used by KDE Plasma 5 KMail in ‘.local/share/’ and then restart Akonadi and the KMail client – you may have to move some of the mail directories displayed by the Leap 42.2 KMail client to restore the view you had in the KDE3 KMail client.
That (or exporting/importing the mail) is not even necessary.
The location for mails is fully configurable.
So just point the existing “Local Folders” resource to the old location, or maybe better create a new maildir or mixedmaildir resource (you can have as many as you want) and configure that to use the old location (you can then copy or move the mails to the other one in kmail if you prefer).
The OP has asked the same question on the opensuse-kde mailinglist too, that discussion is here:
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-kde/2017-02/msg00003.html
Btw, there is no such thing as a “KDE4 Plasma KMail” or “KDE Plasma5 KMail”.
KMail is an application and independent of the desktop (Plasma).
And depending on the version (of kmail) it uses kdelibs3, kdelibs4, or KDE Frameworks5, and Akonadi (since 4.7) or not. (and different default locations for local mail)
The pre-Akonadi KDE4 version even “imported” the config from the KDE3 version (and continued to use the old location), and the first Akonadi versions automatically migrated that too to Akonadi. I’m not sure if the latest ones would still do that as well though.
I do still have my mails in ~/Mail/ (from KDE3 times) in kdepim4 and kdepim5 without ever doing something manually… Years ago I switched most of my mail accounts to IMAP though, where this doesn’t matter anyway as the mail is stored on the server, that’s just better suited if you want to access them from several systems.
PS: another option would probably be to just continue to use KDE3 kmail.
It is still available for 42.2 from the KDE:KDE3 repo (and actually it is even still included in Tumbleweed, the maintainers just didn’t bother to submit it, or any KDE3/Qt3 package for that matter, to Leap for some reason)
Of course that’s even less supported than kdepim4.
But some people prefer that to avoid Akonadi…
Thanks for the reply. The only place I can find mail directories is in .local/share/akonadi_maildir_resource_0. So you mean I should copy my KDE3 mail directories here?
Thanks for your help. Bob
If I point my “Local Folders” resource to a new folder, won’t I lose the last couple of weeks of mail? Or can I use two “Local Folders” resources?
Yes.
Or can I use two “Local Folders” resources?
I already answered that: you can have as many “Local Folders” resources as you want.
OK. I’ll give it a whirl. Thanks
I would recommend to add a “KMail Mail Folder” resource though, that has explicitly been created for compatibility with older kmail versions and should just work with the folder as-is in any case.
I’ve created another Local Mail folder in .kde/share/apps/kmail/mail (the old KDE3 mail location) and the new kmail seems to be finding it allright. Although I like kdepim3 better than the current version I don’t want to get to the point where I have all my email in a very ancient system no one can advise me on anymore.
Just for the record: yes that’s correct – the default directory for Leap 42.2 kmail5 version 16.08.2-1.1 is ~/.local/share/akonadi_maildir_resource_0/.
If you are multilingual you may have noticed that, the Leap 42.2 KMail “automagically” detects the language for spell-checking on a sentence-by-sentence basis.