[kde-linux] Exporting mails from kmail

[Kevin Krammer]

On Friday 06 July 2007, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> 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.

Hmm. Can you try the way through the config?
- shutting KMail down
- move directory
- change config
- start KMail

You can try it with a different user account. e.g. creating a tar archive 
from .kde
Set KMail to offline mode before creating the archive, otherwise it will 
probably (depending on your settings) start to fetch email in the test setup.

> 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.

Right. I misunderstood this as you referring to a specific one you are using 
yourself.

> 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.

Somebody else in this thread mentioned the option to also use the subject for 
sorting. It is a bit unrelyable due to different mail clients using different 
prefixes for "Reply" but it might improve the results you get.

The only relyable method is to use the reference headers stored in the mails 
themselves, since the mail client knows which mail it is creating a reply to.

Unfortunately some mail clients really screw this up, especially old ones 
(e.g. Lotus Notes)

> 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?

Filters are part of the KMail configuration file and are not effected by the 
move of the mail directory.
Same for identities and addresses, but they are in different locations.

> 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.

The "enable final" option basically means that the buildsystem will create one 
single CPP file for all dependend files and compile just this one instead of 
compiliing every single file by itself.
Since this means that include have only to be processed once, it usually 
results in a speed up, but it can also result in a major slowdown if the 
machine has to start swapping to compile the now huge file.

Cheers,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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