Akonadi disaster

Sat Oct 8 09:24:45 BST 2016

On Friday October 07 2016 23:51:00 Anders Lund wrote:

>I can click on a message header, but instead of showing it, kmails claims it 
>is "retrieving folder contents". Not what I asked for...

That's KMail's BSOD which has been plaguing me since forever. Less in 4.13.3 and (with the latest commits) 4.14 but it still happens, esp. with GMail accounts.

>From what I understand it's a result of disagreement between what KMail thinks the akonadi_imap agent is doing and what it's actually doing, combined with a blocking wait on a socket. (Usually when this happens and I tell KMail to quit, it exits only after I restarted akonadi.)

>Akonadi also appears to choke without any sign of that happening, apart from 
>the lack of new mail. Then a restart is required.

Yes, I've also seen that, though fortunately it's very rare and since I have a copy running on 2 machines (plus my phone telling me about new email) I usually detect it soon enough.

I see one solution that shouldn't be too hard to implement and also doesn't require pouring the akonadi koolaid ("akonaid" :)) down the drain:
make the imap agent optional and implement a version of it as part of the KMail process. That should make it possible to address most if not all issues if indeed this "BSOD" is due to a comms problem where KMail keeps waiting for the imap agent.
* add an imap account through the akonadi KCM -> adds an imap agent (shows up in KMail too)
* add an imap account in KMail -> default setting will use an imap "agent" running as a procedure in KMail, optionally create an akonadi imap agent.

Akonadi can of course continue to provide an imap agent for other applications, but how many are there exactly that query this agent?

>But as I said, apart from that I really like kmail!

Maybe it's actually a feature designed to give you something more to do with the application you love so much ;)

If so ... KMail could and should offer an action (menu, button, shortcut, whatever) to restart akonadi and itself ...

On Saturday October 08 2016 00:39:30 Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> This hints to me that something on your setup is different to my setup.

In my experience it makes a big difference if you have GMail accounts configured or not.

> KMail just crushes every other GUI based mail client I tried

I agree that even in V4.13+ it's better than most other modern clients I know. The only thing that really keeps annoying me about it is the refusal to implement something like an imap prefix. It may not be standards-compliant and the standard may provide an alternative, but in practice it's still a very useful feature to have with certain IMAP servers.

KMail is the only client I know though that systematically leaves "ghosted" copies of mail I supposedly deleted on my GMail accounts. This happens when I delete the email when another (IMAP?) operation is running. From the looks of it the local state things the email is now in the wastebin (it shows up in there, actually), but on the server it really hasn't moved. If I catch it before doing anything else I can back out of the issue by doing an undo and then deleting the message again, but that basically happens only when I realise what I just did.

On Friday October 07 2016 16:16:39 Dave Stevens wrote:
>I left mail for claws a few years ago

Sylpheed Claws? I've been using that for years on OS X in conjunction with Apple Mail. That worked great, but when I dunked Mail.app for KMail it no longer made a lot of sense to keep running an X11-based MUA when I had everything in a "native" app. I still use it for certain operations though, like (indeed) those that involve large mail folders.

R