Kmail: Archiving folders with corrupt duplicate messages

[Peter Humphrey]

On Friday 02 Dec 2016 18:31:55 Peter Wibberley wrote:

> My objective is to move my kmail and other PIM data to a new computer with a
> fresh install of Linux Mint 17.3KDE.  I would like some means of cleaning
> my kmail folders without having to search for the rogue duplicate messages
> one by one. so that I can archive and move my kmail messages.

I've spent many an hour wrestling with KMail-2 and duplicate or corrupt 
messages. I too have only POP3 accounts, no IMAP.

Have you tried the folder archive tool in KMail? If you select Local Folders, 
then Archive Folder, it will tar up all the messages in all your local 
folders. You can export your filters too from the Configure Filters dialogue. 
I suggest you do that, then:

Make sure KMail and akonadi aren't running, by commanding "akonadictl stop". 
Wait until ps doesn't show akonadi or MySQL running, then rm -r 
~/.local/share/baloo. Restart akonadi and go and make a brew while it re-
indexes all your messages. Disclaimer: I don't use any of the other PIM 
components, only KMail, so I can't offer any guarantees. Maybe you just need 
to remove ~/.local/share/baloo/email; I haven't tried doing that.

You may have to repeat both steps once or twice, but after that you should 
have a reasonably clean message set, which you will be able to import into 
your new setup.

One hint: when running operations on folders, don't be tempted to start one 
until the previous one has finished - it can only do one thing at a time, poor 
thing. I found the hard way that impatience here causes all sorts of problems; 
since learning that lesson I've had no more corruption of e-mails.

-- 
Regards
Peter