KMail2 documentation: Troubleshooting

[David Bryant]

I'm ready to tackle Chapter 7 (the last chapter, except for Credits!) in the 
KMail2 documentation. All the material is seriously out of date (from 2012) 
and relates to KMail 4.9. So I'm wondering if I ought to leave most of it in, 
or just remove most of it as being irrelevant. If you have an opinion, I'd 
like to hear it.

I have the following specific concerns.

-- The first section advises users to change the value "Online=false" to 
"Online=true" in file ~/.config/akonadi/agent_config_akonadi_maildispatcher_agent 
in certain circumstances. This looks like outmoded advice to me ... I checked 
all the versions of KMail2 that I could (eight different distros), and this file 
always says "DesiredOnlineState=true". So I suppose there has been a program 
update that was never reflected in the documentation.

-- The second section advises people how to recover if the migration from 
KMail to KMail2 fails. I was probably one of the last people to do this, 
putting it off until late 2014. Is there really any point in leaving this 
section in the documentation? I guess I could leave it in, and add a note 
saying that this migration happened about ten years ago.

-- The third section describes a bug that caused multiple copies of "local 
folders" to be created by the akonadi server. I vaguely recall this problem, 
but I can't find it among the kmail2 bugzilla reports. It looks as if bug 
reports more than 10 years old have been expunged. So I suppose this bug was 
corrected a long time ago. Leave it in? Or delete it?

-- The fourth item involves an error message "Unable to fetch item from 
backend", which I will retain because there are several open bug reports 
involving this particular error message.

-- Fifth item will also be retained; this problem (mail transport fails) has 
bitten me recently. I'll probably try to add more information ... in my 
experience, "dbus" sometimes fails to work correctly, leading to all kinds of 
trouble (and not just in kmail).

-- I know of two problems involving akonadi that I have dealt with recently: 
"NULL" entries in pimitemtable (in the mysql "akonadi" database), and "dirty" 
items reported by akonadictl fsck. I will add troubeshooting tips for these 
two problems as part of the rewrite. Are there any other error conditions that 
should be covered in "troubleshooting tips and tricks"?

Thank you for thinking about this. Any and all comments / suggestions are 
welcome. Feel free to write to me directly: davidbryant at gvtc.com.
-- 
David Bryant
Canyon Lake, Texas
https://davidcbryant.net