[kde-linux] Exporting mails from kmail

[Kevin Krammer]

On Saturday 07 July 2007, Peter Humphrey wrote:
> On Thursday 05 July 2007 10:17, Kevin Krammer wrote:
> > There is a nice tool for manipulating KDE programs' config files:
> > kwriteconfig The above change would be achieved like this
> >
> > % kwriteconfig --file kmailrc --group General --key
> > folders "/path/to/newmaildir"
>
> I've decided to stick with kmail, but on a fresh installation on another
> disk. Is this tool likely to help me with the rest of the job of moving to
> a new setup? The program imported the mail files nicely, but what about all
> the other things? Filters, expiry times, signatures, identities and so on?

Hmm. The tool is mainly intended to manipulate a small number of settings, if 
you need to "merge" a newly created config file with lots of settings from an 
old one it is probably better to do it in a text editor.

I think filters, expiry times and signatures are part of the KMail config, 
identities are part of a file called "emailidentities" (also in the KDE 
config directory), contacts/addresses are usually 
in .kde/share/apps/kabc/std.vcf (default addressbook resource)

There are a couple of threads on this mailing list about backup of KMail 
related things and moving to a different user account or different machine.

Basically my suggestion usually is to create an archive of all the files, e.g. 
a tar archive, as it will create the files with proper user and rights on 
extraction (plain copying can mess this up)

There is also an application for backup and restore of "user state" data, 
called Kamion.
I am not sure if there are already binary packages for it, I'll try to get 
some information about its current state.

> I tried copying the [Filter #n] sections from the old kmailrc to the new
> one, but that had no effect so I restored the previous kmailrc. I don't
> want to copy the whole file because kmail was not threading properly and
> I'd rather start afresh - but what a lot of labour!

There is probably an additonal entry which holds the number of filters and if 
it is not present KMail won't read the sections. (speculation, but I've seen 
applications handling it this way)

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