showstopper problem with kmail filenames with colons - file names that are not allowed on windows

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 29.01.10 23:49:00, Karol Depka Pradzinski wrote:
> Hi.
> Foreword: I tried to search for a solution for this quite hard on Google and 
> Nabble with absolutely no results. Is it possible, that I am the only one with 
> this problem? Nah...
> 
> I cannot use my KMail (and possibly Kontact in general) data from Linux under 
> Windows because there are lots of files with colons in names (which are illegal 
> chars for DOS/Windows file names). Possibly other illegal chars are there too.
> What can I do?
> Is there any "escape sequence" for these characters in kde-windows ?
> Could I use KRename mass-rename? But rename to what?
> 
> Examples of file names:
> /home/karolrvn/Mail/sent-mail/cur/1257274396.1241.emLSY_2,S:2,S ( few 
> thousands of these)

This particular one is not a KDE problem, thats simply the maildir
format which says that flags for the mails are to be separated by a
colon (IIRC). There's nothing KDE or KMail can do about this, except
allowing you to store your mails in a different format (like mbox).

> Please help me. I can hardly use e-mail now, when on Windows, because of the 
> aforementioned problem.

Leave your mails on a mailserver that has IMAP support would be a
solution to your current problems. 

> If this issue is not resolved, I'm afraid, that my 
> (rather interesting) relationship with Kontact (and possibly KDE in general) 
> will end after many years and I will probably switch to something like 
> Thunderbird which seems 100% cross-platform.

Yeah and it breaks as soon as you hit 2 or 4G on your mailboxes because
it still uses the ancient outdated mbox format.

Andreas

-- 
You recoil from the crude; you tend naturally toward the exquisite.