[kde-freebsd] Re: Call for test: KDE PIM 4.6.0

[Oliver Heesakkers]

Op zaterdag 18 juni 2011 12:02:35 schreef u:
> On Wednesday 15 June 2011 11:06:09 Oliver Heesakkers wrote:
> > Slightly off-topic, but has anyone ever started a fork of kmail for
> > the sake 'light'-ness?
> 
> ...and freedom from akonadi? (...)
> What is the rationale behind akonadi, anyway? (...)

Well yes, freedom from Akonadi does sound nice right about now. AFAIK Akonadi 
was introduced because the original storage method reached it's limits of some 
sort. For me though I never had a problem (with over 30.000 mails in a single 
folder at one time) and the bloat of Akonadi seems to have done more to bring 
my computer down in speed than anything previously experienced.

Now, I like to point out that I'm in no way against adding integration, 
functionality, gimmicks and such to the KDE SC. Not only does it provide a 
very pretty and welcoming landing place for first time visitors to FreeBSD 
(PC-BSD) or even Linux, but it also provides a work flow unparalleled by any 
other WM I've ever tried.

The current situation with kmail does tarnish the experience, but in no way 
ruins it.

Meanwhile, my problem getting mail to land in the right folder deteriorated. 
In hindsight this may have been due to (or aggravated by) the fact that I had 
replaced the physical mail folder somewhere under $HOME/.kde4/share/ with a 
symlink to $HOME/mail. At one point all filtering broke, which is when I 
decided to start fresh and removed $HOME/.kde4

I cleaned up some of the akonadi-resources before I started my fresh kontact 
session. At this point I remembered the symlink (now deleted) and decided to 
let kmail build me a new set of folders and I would transfer all the old mail 
to the new folderset.
This turned out to be (next to) impossible. Dragging and dropping the mail 
within kmail was incredibly slow. Once the mail was transferred they were all 
marked unread and the "Mark all messages as read" option was greyed out, so I 
had to move over every mail one by one to get them marked read. Also deleting 
mails was impossible, even though dragging them did move them.
Trying to transfer whole folders led to their disappearance (lost two mail 
folders this way, yay for backups).

This then finally brought me to the point where I decided to implement an idea 
I've had for a while now. I moved all my mail to a local server (by tarballing 
the folders an unpacking them in a Maildir++ fashion on the server). On this 
server I've configured fetchmail to fetch all my pop3 mail (complete with 
STARTTLS) and procmail to filter and drop all the mail immediately into the 
right maildir. Served up by Dovecot I now have only one IMAP-account to 
configure in kmail. As an added bonus I can now access all the folders and 
(historical) mail through my Nokia N900 over a 3G connection or through a 
webmail client.

Issues remaining:
- General "lagging" while handling folders (not too bad)
- Pulling up kmail settings takes almost a minute
- Pulling up kontact settings takes close to four minutes (as it has to 
include all settings from all parts of course)
- I can't find the setting that makes akregator the initial screen on start up 
of kontact.
- kwallet asks for my password even before starting kontact (what If don't 
want to handle email for a particular KDE session)
- Piping the output of startx I see this for every mail I click: 
http://heesakkers.info/showandtell/kmail.txt

This logfile fills up quite quickly.

Wow, that turned out to be a lengthy mail. Hope it helps though!