[kdepim-users] importing old kmail emails

[Gene Heskett]

On Thursday 01 January 2015 08:54:12 Maurice did opine
And Gene did reply:
> On Wed, 31 Dec 2014 13:36:43 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> >  get about 25Gb of
> > 
> > old mail from the previous installations drive, now mounted at
> > /media/ubuslash.
> 
> That's a helluva lot of email!
> (Mine's just under 1GB, going back 10 years.)

I'm 80, (and my first name is also Maurice) and a retired J.O.A.T., 
potentially a member of mensa, so my mailing list subscriptions are, shall 
we say, Eclectic.  And those which I've had really long term associations 
with have no expiry schedule.  Plus it seems the akonadi bs, or something  
keeps its own copies, at least doubling the size of the database.  Or did, 
I did a purge on some of that a year or so back, and it has not come back, 
so a "du -h Mail" reports 5.3Gb right now, a much more believable figure.

I hadn't noted until now that all the dups had not come back.  ISTR I also 
purged another so-called mail utility at the time, Soprano or something 
like that comes to mind.  Part of the original 10.04 LTS server install 
plus enough kde to make kmail work.  It kept getting my attention by 
grabbing 100% of a core and need root to kill the darned thing.
 
> > But there appears to be no way to tell this new kmail
> > that its there.
> 
>   I didn't use any 'import' function.

Well, while booted to this install, I mounted the new drive and sicced mc 
into copying the ~/Mail folder to an old-Mail folder on that drive.  A 
simple mv will take care of that miss-match.
> 
> I just set Kmail's 'local' folder to use ~/mail, so you should be able
> to tell it to use your /media/ubuslash email folder.

I couldn't find in the new menus, where to set that. But I'll obviously 
look again the next time I swap drives and reboot to Mint-17.1 LTS 
Cinnamon.

>   (Mind you, with that amount of email you would probably need to leave
> it overnight to index!)
> 
> N.B. I use POP, not IMAP.

So do I, although I would like to set up an imap server here that would be 
accessible from the rest of my home network.  Its a bit of a pain in my 
ancient arthritic back to have to come down the hill from the shop where 
my cnc machines are, just to send a message to the emc-users list, or to 
get a reply.  What would be the cats meow would be to make the imap sw 
(dovecot?) access and export via imap, the database kmail sets up, so it 
is then available to all 3 of the cnc machines.  But in following that 
list, and asking a question here and there, the best impression I get is 
that both claws and dovecot are buggier than a 10 day old road kill 
carcass.

I like software that Just Works(TM), which with 2 or 3 niggles, kmail has 
done since 1998 for me.  The major niggle is that when I have set options 
and checked the sticky box, it ignores the sticky and changes the 
transport path, or the ID, and of course the mailing list bounces my 
message because of the miss-match between the subscribed address and where 
the message purports to come from.  I suspect its a timing of popups 
problem because it happens only when I send by clicking on the send 
button, but not when I send with a ctrl+return.

The other niggle I solved years ago was that its not multi-threaded, so 
the composer goes to sleep when kmail is out collecting email from the 3 
servers it can access.  But I reduced that to just a second or less at a 
time by setting up mailfilter to nuke on the server, that which I don't 
want, then fetchmail grabs the rest, hands it off to procmail as the MDA, 
which in turn runs everything through spamassassin, and clamd, delivering 
all incoming mail to one of 3 dirs in /var/spool/mail, and a daemon I 
wrote in bash detects the closing of one of those files, and sends kmail a 
get mail command over the dbus.  I have nothing left to do but read and 
reply to the mail if I choose.  And nuke the virii file a clamd detection 
expands about annually.  I also have a ham & spam folders, and a cron 
driven bash script that looks at both with sa-learn nightly, deleting that 
spam I put there, and leaving the ham which I then drag-n-drop on the 
correct folder the next day.

By offloading all the mail pulling from kmail , all it has to do then is 
sort the mail it finds there into the proper folders, which it can do in a 
few milliseconds.

Out here in the puckerbrush, I have only one choice of ISP/mail server 
that is NOT contaminated with gmail crap, the server at my former place of 
employment, where I have the same account I've had since we setup our own 
mail server in late 1998, when I was the Chief Engineer at that TV 
station.  That Qmail install gets me 100x the spam that Gmail does, but it 
has many other advantages that make up for it. Only 20 air miles and 7 or 
8 hops thru the net away, the response time is quite low.  My every 3 
minute mailfilter/fetchmail scan is an un-noticeable load.  All those 
scripts are already copied to the newer install.

My drives are in a 3 drive QC cage, so I will swap drives shortly and see 
if I can make kmail see what I copied last night.

Thanks for reading this far.

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
US V Castleman, SCOTUS, Mar 2014 is grounds for Impeaching SCOTUS
_______________________________________________
KDE PIM users mailing list
Subscription management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kdepim-users