KMail and KDE-plasma: a tale of woe

[Peter Humphrey]

Hello lists,

(I've sent this to both gentoo-user and kdepim-users as being relevant in 
both lists - I'm using kde-apps/kmail-16.12.0-r1 on Gentoo.)

Well, I think I can finally emerge from a long battle to get KMail working. 
It's been uphill all the way - except for the frequent slips backwards to 
start abain. (I still don't have spell checking, as you see.)

The main problem has been to recover archived e-mails, which sounds simple 
enough as I always keep a week of daily archives on a different partition, 
but it wasn't. The routine would go like this:

1.	Set up KMail the way I like it, but on an empty message set. Save the 
arrangement for use next time.
2.	Import the latest archive to a temporary folder.
3.	Mark all the imported messages as read and move each folder into position 
under Local Folders. Delete the temporary folder.
4.	Restore all the filters.
5.	Cross fingers and fetch new mail (POP as my ISP doesn't offer IMAP).
6.	KMail goes haywire. It re-creates the temporary folder and proceeds to 
fill it with duplicates of all the existing messages. All those duplicates 
prevent me from making a new archive until I clear them all out, 
painstakingly (yes, I did actually check several thousand e-mails for 
uniqueness).
7.	Sigh. Delete the temporary folder again and have another go. Same result.
8.	Give up and start again.

Latterly, it changed slightly and sent all those duplicates to the sent-mail 
folder instead of creating a new folder for them. I think this coincided 
with me using a different archive file from the previous day.

In the end I used Ark to extract the sent-mail directory from the archive 
and save it as a simple directory structure under
"./.Local Folders.directory", then delete what I'd extracted from the 
archive. Then the import went smoothly in two stages: sent-mail, and 
everything else.

I lost count of the times I rebooted durning the whole struggle, but it may 
well have reached 100. To omit a reboot was to risk the next step going 
wrong. That's compounded by having to start KMail twice each time, because 
the first time, it shows a progress bar stuck at 0% with no indication of 
what is supposed to be in progress. This may be connected with the 
segmentation faults I still see sometimes on shutdown; it's hard to be sure.

Let's hope for some stability now. I still feel as though I'm walking on 
eggshells.

-- 
Regards
Peter