Goodbye for now, kmail

[Martin Steigerwald]

Anders Lund - 06.05.17, 12:19:
> På Sat, 06 May 2017 12:07:22 +0200
> 
> Daniel Vrátil <dvratil at kde.org> skrev:
> > You have Trojita and Sink, both support IMAP and don't use Akonadi.
> > There's no way to add IMAP to KMail without using Akonadi.
> 
> No? I can't imagine this is due to technical reasons, so it must be
> religious. So a fork may be the way to go?

Anders, it *is* due to technical reasons.

Current KMail only speaks to Akonadi. I go as far as saying: Without major 
rework it is locked to it. So if you want to add IMAP without Akonadi to KMail 
you also need to do the integration with KMail, which I believe would be quite 
invasive change.

Either you would completely move back to pre-akonadi times of KMail which is a 
no-go for current KMail developers or you´d have to maintain *two* completely 
different IMAP access methods within KMail, including an Akonadi and a non-
Akonadi access method. I don´t see how this would be maintainable by the 
current team.

And again the most important question:

Who would do the fork? You? If not, whomelse? I don´t see *anyone* 
volunteering. Do you?

That said, you could go back in time and use Trinity with pre-akonadi KMail, 
which basically is a fork.

> Kmail worked fine without akonadi for many years.

It is tempting to glorify pre-akonadi times, but I clearly remember I had all 
sorts of issues with pre-akonadi KMail as well, like the already mentioned 
broken index while and blocked GUI issues. And some my own bug triaging 
experience where I closed a lot of ancient bug reports I got the impression I 
haven´t been alone with that.

Was it working better? Probably yes. But at least for my point of view 
"Working fine" is an exaggeration.

> Trojita at this point in time is not usable for my purpose, I evaluated
> that two times, latest a few weeks ago. Sink I didn't hear of, and thus
> not evaluate.

I think Trojita has basically one developer. It doesn´t seem to progress fast.

Most hopes within KDE I have for Sink, but OTOH this doesn´t have POP3 and I 
think their devs are not interested to implement POP3 resource for it. Yet… I 
do not feel comfortable with storing 10+ years of mail history on my Dovecot 
server which also is accessible via IMAP. For two reasons:

- privacy concerns: What happens if someone would be able to break into my 
server?

- storage constraints on the server.

I think I would be comfortable with IMAP + automatic archiving to local 
folders, but I never found a mail client capable of doing that in a reliable 
and automated way. KMail may be close to it, as it can move old mails to 
different folders.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin