My major issue with Akonadi: Blocking on user input

[Martin Steigerwald]

Martin Steigerwald - 27.07.17, 12:43:
> During *whatever* large operation be it folder synchronisation, moving 
> thousands of mails or whatever else, Akonadi blocks out any interactive 
> requests made by me as a KMail user.
> 
> So basically Akonadi still does not fully fulfill its initial promise:
> 
> Always keep the UI of KMail responding to user input. Granted the KMail UI 
> does not block completely, but when it can´t do anything useful anymore
> like  displaying a mail, its quite useless to me.
> 
> I just today saw it again while moving thousands of mails from a large IMAP 
> folder to an archival folder on the same IMAP account, which unfortunatly
> is hosted by Exchange. While the background operation takes place and
> Akonadi just uses about 20% of CPU during sending lots of IMAP commands (so
> mostly Akonadi IMAP resource active) KMail doesn´t display *any* mail I
> click on anymore, presenting me with the infamous "Retrieving contents"
> blocker message.

I actually started that move mail operating for exactly that reason:

Whenever I clicked on the sent mail folder Akonadi first starts to synchronize 
its contents even when it did so just a minute ago. And then it blocks on user 
input. So I thought I move all mails from 2016 and older to an archive folder.

Seriously this behavior is just unacceptable. I don´t care whether the folder 
is fully synchronized… Akonadi can do it in the background and for sake of not 
wasting tons of server resources, local database resources and network 
bandwidth not just do it on every click on the folder (I want to disable that, 
but I can´t currently, see thread "synchronisation settings"). I just want to 
see that one mail that I sent… now.

So my plea to capable developers who know enough about Akonadi to actually 
understand it: Please fix this. Whenever I had a go at the source, I felt lost. 
I basically never really truly understood how the different components of 
Akonadi work with one another. I have a rough idea… but once as I wanted to 
find out on what occasions Akonadi starts a folder synchronisations I had a go 
at the source and just didn´t get it.

Thank you,
-- 
Martin