[kdepim-users] How to disable mail indexing with Akonadi search

[O. Sinclair]

On 06/02/2016 20:35, Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Hello!
> 
> Back in Baloo times it was easy to disable mail indexing. But with Akonadi 
> Search which as I understand is basically a renamed Baloo for mail stuff I 
> didn´t find a way yet. Can one disable it?
> 
> I searched for an option in akonadi_indexing_agent settings, but didn´t find 
> one.
> 
> I excluded the biggest folders yet it still crawls Akonadi to a halt with at 
> least 90-100% CPU load on mysqld for tenth of minutes or more up to the point 
> where something happens that doesn´t happen with Akonadi + KDEPIM from master 
> otherwise since all the performance improvements: KMail looses connection to 
> Akonadi and is unusable unless I restart it.
> 
> Also currently the mail index would grow to big that BTRFS gets into trouble 
> with free space, up to kernel 4.3 even freezing up the whole machine with a 
> kworker thread searching for free space (known issue in BTRFS, that may or may 
> not be fixed in 4.4 or later).
> 
> For now at least for the storage thing I did:
> 
> touch ~/.local/share/akonadi/search_db
> 
> then akonadi indexing agent does not create a directory there and no space is 
> used up.
> 
> As you know my mail setup is a bit crazy, so I know the index is big, but 
> still after 5 GiB I keep wondering whether it needs to be that big, especially 
> as I excluded at least the folders with LKML mails.
> 
> For now until I have more free SSD space I just want to disable it.
> 
> I help myself with repeating
> 
> killall /home/kde/install/bin/akonadi_indexing_agent
> 
> until Akonadi gives up starting the indexing agent after each time I start 
> Akonadi by logging into a Plasma session or restarting it after a new compile 
> from master.
> 
> Also with indexing "disabled" like this Akonadi doesn´t auto complete anything 
> in to address field. Not even from address book which is quite annoying. Only 
> from recent addresses, but this is only mail addresses not the Name 
> <mail at address> form I prefer.
> 
> I am willing to look more closely at why indexing crawls down Akonadi to an 
> halt at some time, but not now.
> 
> So is there a way to just tell it not to indexing *any* mail? I think such an 
> option is still important and if its just for people with low free disk space.
> 
> So or so I get the impression since Baloo mail indexing has been renamed to 
> Akonadi search and put into Akonadi repo no one really looked into it anymore. 
> In KDE SC 4.14 times it really worked good. It still works fine on my KDE SC 
> 4.14 based KDEPIM on the workstation at works. So I am a bit sad that it again 
> is broken for me.
> 
As far as I understand it Baloo is the "search engine" and you can
disable that. But Akonadi is the database "underneath" and you can not
disable that.

You would have to go back to a version of Kmail that does not use
Akonadi and that is way back at KDE 4.3 I think. In Kubuntu there used
to be a ppa for that (don't ask me what it is as I have forgotten, you
can search for it) but very obviously that is not a "way forward" in
terms of development.

check what you get from dmesg (I had an issue with Baloo myself
recently) and see if it gets hooked on certain files/mail or what

NOTE: I am on KDE4 still myself. Any attempt to go Plasma5 has failed
for me, I don't even get a login

kind regards,
Sinclair