[Kde-pim] Re: Data driven mail migration

[John Layt]

On Wednesday 02 March 2011 08:14:55 Till Adam wrote:
> I'd be interested in the top 5 bugs that keep you from doing work. I'm sure
> those are addressable.

OK, so this from from a completely clean install, no previous KMail or Akonadi 
config or cache present, so no migration.  I just pointed KMail2 at my 
exisiting Maildir folder in ~/.Mail and added my pop3/smtp accounts.  
Basically the simple switcher from another mail app scenario, just with 
250,000 mails in my Maildir.

1) Performance.  It just made the entire system run slow for days, if I killed 
Akonadi everything returned to normal.  It could just be the bulk of emails I 
have, but I don't think I'd be that unusual in the early adopter crowd to have 
that many.  If the patches Volker mentioned do fix Nepomuk, or at least 
improve the performance, can we recommend the distro's only ship kdepim 4.6 if 
they ship those patches as well?  I also found performance improved when 
closing just KMail2 but leaving Akonadi running, i wouldn't think the indexing 
would stop in that case?

2) Maildir.  Apparently the Maildir resource ignores the Maildir read/unread 
flag, so all my mails were shown as unread. I completely lost track of what I 
had left unread in various folders so had no idea what needed action.  That's 
OK for someone who practises zero inbox and has only a few folders to mark as 
unread, but it's a pain for the rest of us.  It also doesn't update the flag 
as you read, so anyone switching back to another mail client will not be 
happy.  Kevin also mentioned something about non-standard names for new mails 
which might break other mail clients?

3) Filtering.  There was the filter migration and import issues I ran into 
earlier, which probably wouldn't affect a switcher.  Also if you leave the 
Akonadi pop3 mail resource running when you close KMail2, then later reopen 
KMail2, then any mails received by Akonadi in the interim are not filtered by 
KMail2.

4) Refreshing.  The first time I went into a folder it would only show newly 
arrived mails, not my old mails and I would have to PF5 to refresh it and wait 
for the mails to be loaded.  To a newbie it would be scary seeing an empty 
mail folder.  This was probably just while Nepomuk was doing the initial 
index, but Nepmuk did seem to stop indexing before finishing all the folders.  
Is there some way to make it that on entering an unindexed folder for the 
first time it automatically refreshes?

Numbers 3 & 4 were annoyances but would create a bad first impression, it was 
1 and 2 that sent me back after 3 days, others might be less tolerant. Perhaps 
someone with just a few thousand emails wouldn't be so badly affected.

I've raised bugs for both 2 and 3.

> No, that's not right. Sounds like a bug where the migration creates one
> instance per run. I believe this was fixed a few days ago. You can remove
> any duplicate (same source path) maildir or notes resources.

Well, this wasn't from a migration, it was from clean, but hopefully it's a 
general fix.  I'm back on 4.4.10 for now, but as soon as RC1 comes out as 
packages I'll retest both the migration and clean-from-scratch scenarios to 
see if everything works as expected.  I'll also try set up a test vm to test 
things as they stand now.

Cheers!

John.
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