Kmail message storage folders

[cr]

I currently have Kmail on my server, with thousands of messages in Maildir 
format on a separate partition (which simplifies migration/upgrading).
They're sorted into many subfolders such as 'cars', 'accounts', 'kde' etc.

I typically ssh into the server from whichever laptop I'm using and run Kmail 
on the server via ssh, which avoids any syncing issues.   However this does 
mean my server is running for hours just for emails, which costs power.

I'm considering running kmail on a laptop and syncing every few days by 
copying the new emails to the server's partition using 'cp' or Nautilus or 
similar to copy recursively only new mailfiles.   Can anyone confirm if this will 
work?   Is there a better way to sync?

One possible snag I can see is that  kmail has created, in each folder such 
as 'cars', subfolders called 'cur', 'new' and 'tmp'.    Typically 'tmp' is empty 
but both 'cur' and 'new' are full of messages.   How does kmail (or 
akonadi?) assign messages to 'cur' or 'new'?   If it arbitrarily shifts 
messages from one to the other then my copying idea will likely result in 
numerous duplicate messages.

I've tried the Kmail documentation but it doesn't seem to throw any light on 
this.

Chris

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