[Kde-pim] KMail2 migration report

[Andreas Gungl]

Hi everybody,

Last week I decided to install KDE SC 4.6 on my office box. Actually I didn't intend to switch to the latest KDEPIM, however I didn't care enough, so the packages slipped in on OpenSUSE 11.3 - oh my.

First problem, the migration started. As I hadn't stored the passwords for my two online IMAP accounts in the wallet, the migration failed for those two accounts.
Hm, what to do? KMail(2) didn't start anymore. What a pain, but Thunderbird could help me for a while. I decided to create a wallet and try the migration again. I added the passwords, and so the online accounts were migrated after a while (~120.000 messages in total).
But most of the KMail users are lost in that case. There is no helpful notification, just a stalled migration process. Pressing the close button didn't stop the process for the data migration. In fact, I don't know if it's even expected to stop, but I needed to stop it to start new migration runs which in the end picked up the new wallet. top and kill help there, but perhaps that's nothing suited for the average Linux desktop user.

Next problem, I've lost all KMail filters which were not associated to actions (in other words, showing an icon in the toolbar). I guess it's related to changed folder identifiers, as most of my filters included a "move to folder" action. Fortunately most of the filters were old and rarely needed as I use a local IMAP server with Sieve filtering covering 80% of my cases. Well, I re-created a few filters and adjusted the folders for the existing ones. What remains is a bitter taste, though.

Having worked around these problems I decided to stay with the new version. It's a bit risky I know, but I don't feel like investing into finding out which SUSE packages are there containing the old version running on 4.6 - moreover I had to sort out the config files and re-install / restore everything for the old PIM suite. No, thanks.

What bothers me ATM is akonadi_nepomuk* processes running for a while with significant CPU load until Akonadi realizes Nepomuk being not ready. At that point in time the processes vanish (are terminated?). Actually I have switched of all those CPU hogging desktop search overhead in the KDE control center. It's a pity Akonadi seems to ignore that setting, that would make my box more responsive in the minutes after I start Kontact.


Well, I'm through with the migration and I can arrange with the situation. I'm not keen on making Thunderbird my primary tool which it is on my Windows machine.
Perhaps the report can help other people to survive a sudden dump of the new KDEPIM on their box. Or it gives some ideas on how to improve the migration process to avoid such situations for those who will migrate later.

KMail2 isn't as stable as used to be in previous versions. Okay, it's kind of Beta. Sometimes the refresh of folders get stuck. And filtering IMAP messages in the inbox somehow doesn't work. If I filter the messages manually from time to time, I get the expected result. I've checked the filters are marked to be applied for the correct IMAP account, though.

Apart from that I'm still satisfied. ;-) Looking forward to the final KDEPIM 4.6, I hope it will address some of the issues I had with that unintended installation.

Best regards,
Andreas
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