[kde-linux] Exporting mails from kmail

[Peter Humphrey]

On Friday 06 July 2007 00:28:32 Kevin Krammer wrote:
> On Thursday 05 July 2007, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> > I require my mail directories, among others, to live on a separate
> > partition, which I mount on whichever system I've booted. Kmail will
> > not allow me this flexibility - evidently it knows better than I do.
>
> Actually it should do.
> What distribution are you using (assuming you use binary packages)?
> Which version of KMail/KDE is it?

This is gentoo ~amd64.* Now that I look at the date stamps on the 
directories I kept when I switched to kmail, I see that it was over a year 
ago. So kmail may well have improved since then - apologies if I've 
impugned it unjustly. I do remember though that, at the time, when I set a 
link to ~/common/Mail.kmail (where I wanted to keep my mail directories), 
next time I started kmail it had been overwritten with an empty directory.

> > I also want a program that doesn't screw up the thread structure when
> > someone uses a Web mail program to write their replies, instead of an
> > e-mail client. The current version of kmail is woefully bad in this
> > respect.
>
> This is strange. Can you check whether the web mail software keeps the
> proper references intact. Some clients unfortunately do not support mail
> threading and destroy the reply references. Though I never heard of a web
> mail interface doing so.

People seem to use all manner of Web e-mail clients on the list I'm thinking 
of, so I don't think it's feasible for me to check exhaustively. Some 
people's e-mails are shown alone, not in a thread at all, which I assume is 
an example of the destruction of references that you mention. That's not 
too serious a problem; it's just a nuisance. Others' e-mails do appear in a 
thread, but out of place - in many cases well before the ones they're 
replying to. Still other e-mails appear in what seems to be the wrong 
thread altogether.

Incidentally, if I did manage to point kmail to another place, would all the 
mail folder structure be preserved as well, and the filters etc?

* Running equery to report what USE flags kmail was compiled with gives the 
following result:

$ equery u kmail
[ Searching for packages matching kmail... ]
[ Colour Code : set unset ]
[ Legend : Left column  (U) - USE flags from make.conf              ]
[        : Right column (I) - USE flags packages was installed with ]
[ Found these USE variables for kde-base/kmail-3.5.7 ]
 U I
 + + arts           : Adds support for aRts: the KDE sound daemon
 + + crypt          : Add support for encryption -- using mcrypt or gpg 
where applicable
 - - debug          : Enable extra debug codepaths, like asserts and extra 
output. If you want to get meaningful backtraces see 
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/backtraces.xml .
 - - elibc_FreeBSD  : <unknown>
 + + kdeenablefinal : EXPERIMENTAL: KDE ebuilds will use the enable-final 
flag, yielding compilation speedups at the cost of heavy mem usage and 
potentially causing problems. We strongly discourage setting this.
 - - xinerama       : Add support for the xinerama X11 extension, which 
allows you to stretch your display across multiple monitors

I've just noticed the caution about kdeenablefinal, which I think wasn't 
there when I declared it in /etc/make.conf many months ago. Looks like I 
should try removing it. Meanwhile I'm going to try moving my kmail 
installation to a new system I'm building.

-- 
Rgds
Peter Humphrey
Linux Counter 5290, Aug 93