[Mageia-discuss] problems with kmail2

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi Renaud,

On Fri, 02 Nov 2012 18:28:03 +0100
Renaud MICHEL <r.h.michel+mageia at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello
> 
> I upgraded yesterday my computer from mageia 1 to mageia 2, most work but I 
> am having problems with kmail2.
> I had read a lot about it, so I knew I had to export my filters to re-import 
> them after upgrade. That worked, although at first they didn't seem to be 
> properly applied, now that part is working.
> I also executed kmail-migrator by hand before starting kmail itself. It 
> didn't import the password stored in kmail1 configuration, but thanks to 
> this forum post
> http://fixunix.com/mandriva/342585-kmail-password-decoding.html
> I was able to restore them.
> 
> But that akonadi-based kmail feels like a big step backward compared to how 
> rock-stable kmail1 was.
> 
> akonadi is configured to use an external mysql instance, and a few times I 
> have seen the mysqld process go crazy on a big select from akondi. After 
> more than an hour the select was still not finished (or was restarted in a 
> loop by akonadi?) and I had to restart the akonadi server to make it stop.
> I have a little over 100000 mails, could that be the problem? Is that too 
> much for akonadi?
> 
> Some times it takes kmail many seconds to show the content of a folder or to 
> change the status of a mail (from unread to read), and it happens quite 
> frequently that I have a popup about a conflict on a mail (the differences 
> being the date and a tag \SEEN). How can there be conflict with a single 
> mail client?
> Some times I have to wait some minutes for it to make the actions I asked 
> for (mark mails as read or move them to trash).
> On such occasion I see this message in akonadi error log
> 
> ItemRetrieverException :  Resource was unable to deliver item
> 
> 
> On one occasion, akonadi lost its connection to mysql, with this message 
> repeated several times in its error log
> 
> Database error: DataStore::beginTransaction
>   Last driver error: "QMYSQL: Unable to begin transaction"
>   Last database error: "MySQL server has gone away"
> 
> Mysql was still there, but I had to restart akonadi (not mysql) to make it 
> work again.
> 
> The worst is that it has lost some mails!
> I know because some of the mails sent to this list didn't make it to me, on 
> one occasion I saw it mark the folder as having 3 unread mails, and when I 
> wanted to go see them (with a shortcut to go to the next unread message) the 
> count went down to 1, I can see the missing mail on the list archive, but 
> not in my inbox (even if I go look at the files).
> I only have POP3 accounts and I didn't even configure a spam filter yet (I 
> read there has been some problem with that, which should be fixed in 4.8.5).
> 
> I am considering downgrading to kmail1 from mga1, but I guess I will have to 
> downgrade all of kdepim.
> Does it get any better with KDE 4.9?
> 
> Or maybe I will switch to another mail client, is there another for KDE or 
> should I go to a GTK one like claws-mail?
> 

I cannot help you with your KMail2/Akonadi issues, but I can say that after
KMail 2  and me did not get along, I had to switch to a different MUA (= mail
user agent), and eventually went with claws-mail. Claws-Mail is not perfect,
but it has most of KMail's useful features, and appears to work nicely. It's
also very fast, and I run it fine through ssh over my laptop's wifi network
and it's still responsive.

I have written some scripts to convert away from KMail here (let me know if
there's something you don't understand there):

https://bitbucket.org/shlomif/convert-away-from-kmail/overview

They took a lot of time to run here, but it was worth it, and now I'm a
(mostly) happy Claws-Mail user. I do wish that KMail's developers did not screw
up KMail 2 so badly. KMail 1 was *so* great.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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