Why I (almost) stayed with KMail

[Jörg Stadermann]

Here's how I migrated away from kmail and why I almost failed:

Man, what a sorry state today's email clients are in. How long is
email around, 30 years? It seems, most modern clients still assume that
you receive about 10 mail per day and that your folder structure
is as complex as inbox and one or two additional folders. I guess
that's because that what used to be email conversation has shifted more
and more to facebook, twitter and the like. But let's start from the
beginning: My distro (Slackware) stayed with kde 4.4 quite long,
except some minor annoyances Kdepim did a good job for me and
since I'm a long time kde user I saw no real reason to use
something else. Recently .Slackware (in current) switched to 4.8
and I faithfully upgraded, since I never had major problems with
kde.  Now akonadi managed my mail and suddenly I could understand
all the moaning in forums and lists. Mind you, the conversion
went smooth and I still think that akonadi is not such a bad idea
as long as we're talking about unifying resources, but the whole kmal2
experience became rather unpleasant. And that I was forced to use
kwallet is a no-go. After I had my share of "akonadi_resource_bla
is offline" and "Please wait, searching folder content" I
decided, it was time to leave. So long and thank you for the fish.

The first step was to move my mail. Since I wanted to check
several mail clients, the natural choice was IMAP. Surprisingly
enough, kmail did a good job moving my 10,000+ mails to my
provider's server. I have 5GB mail space, so no sweat. Filtering 
incoming mails to folders is done on the server, but I need some
post-processing, like folder-dependent handling of mails, based
on age or sender, a job kmail did quite well. 

Next step was collecting a list of potential replacements for
kmail, preferably with PIM features, but that was not mandatory.
So I came up with Thunderbird (the obvious candidate),  Mutt,
Zimbra (just to check) and claws-mail. Evolution is not an
option, because Slackware does not include Gnome. The first I checked
was Thunderbird 13.01. Wow, that was funny: I use Thunderbird quite
often as a quick and dirty way to check my emails from MS computers,
because it's easy to setup and easy to remove after use, but that
was completely different now, first it's rather slow with IMAP,
second  it's ugly and third it's mail management is really
limited. I.e. to convince Thunderbird to check all folders for new
mail, I had to tweak about:config. I guess thers's probably an
option in the config dialogs, but I couldn't find it. But the
real show stopper was the folder management. There are options
for encoding and syncing and quotas, but processing  mails by
status is limited to age and actions are limited to delete or not
delete. Something like in kmail, "Move messages older than 30
days to archive" is simply not possible. Use filters, I hear you
say. Yeah, good idea, but here's the catch: Thunderbird can do
automatic filtering only on incoming mails! Filters on mails in
folders have to be applied manually. At that point, I decided
Thunderbird is not for me. Why is this thing so popular, even in
business environments? It's a toy, not more.

Next try, Mutt: I always liked Mutt, probably because of the
challenge, but it became apparent very quickly,  that it would
need a lot of effort, getting Mutt fit for today's email
requirements. Not the processing but the displaying of messages is
the problem. Nowadays people tend to sent emails in all kind of
formats with all kind of attached media and you want to see that
stuff right away. I'm sure Mutt can do this, but currently the effort is
too big for me. 

Zimbra: Next one. No, seriously, what's that supposed to be. I
guess there's some vision behind, but I don't get it.

At this point desperation set in. It seemed , there wasn't a
feasible replacement for kmail, which would suit my needs.

Enter claws-mails: It's not pretty, some of it's configuration
seems a bit odd, PIM  is limited to a vCalendar-plugin, but it's
doing the job. There's nothing I did in kmail I can't do in
claws-mail and I guess there are a lot of things it can do that
kmail doesn't. And yes, you can use vim as editor ;-)

It seems claws-mail, mutt and probably Evolution are the only
programs able to handle complex mail requirements. Kmail
could be in that list, if it wasn't for it's present shape.

So if you're looking for a kmail replacement, have a look at
claws-mail. For me it seems to be the best option for kmail power
users.

Joerg


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