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

[Karol Depka Pradzinski]

On 2010-01-30, Saturday, Andreas Pakulat wrote:
> 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).
Hi. Thanks for your quick response.
Kontact(KMail) on Windows is by default also configured to use "mailbox" 
format.
But there is no "_2,S:2,S" suffix, which, on Linux, looks like was present: 
* for older (around KDE 3.x) messages - seems like always 
* for newer (around KDE 4.x) messages - seems like only occasionally
(I'm looking at modification date; BTW is there no file creation date on Linux 
(ext3)? stat command shows only "Access", "Modify", "Change").

Maybe KMail developers dropped usage of the suffix with never versions of KMail?
Maybe I can safely remove it from filenames?
Jaroslaw Staniek wrote, that He replaced : with '!' but I did not find any '!' 
in this dir:
c:\Documents And Settings\karolrvn\AppData\Roaming\.kde\share\apps\kmail\
> 
> > 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.
Thanks for suggestion but that currently is impossible.
> 
> > 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.
Are you sure about that limit?
Does mbox have such a limit or is it due 32-bit offset variables (which could 
be relatively easily replaced by developers with 64 variables).

> 
> Andreas
> 


-- 
Karol Depka Prądziński
VerKnowSys