KMail is irretrievably broken

[Luis Felipe Tabera Alonso]

On miércoles, 13 de septiembre de 2017 16:52:52 (CEST) Peter Humphrey wrote:
> Hello list,
> 
> I've finally had to admit defeat. I cannot get KMail-2 to import my old
> messages, either from a KMail archive or from the corresponding directory
> structure. I created the directory by extracting the archive using Ark.

Peter,

What I did a long time ago when first moved to kmail 2 was the following.

Firts of all, make (yet another) backup.

If you still have kmail1 around, copy the mails you want to keep to a new 
maildir local account. Say 

$HOME/localpath/oldmails

you will have one file per email in the usual 'new cur tmp' subdirectories.

Now, once you have started kmail2 you will have a local maildir account by 
default. I think that, by default it is located in

$HOME/.local/share/local-mail

But you can configure other local accounts too.

Then, just copy the whole folder $HOME/localpath/oldmails inside the new local 
mail directory. So you will end having something like:

 $HOME/.local/share/local-mail
 $HOME/.local/share/local-mail/tmp
 $HOME/.local/share/local-mail/cur
 $HOME/.local/share/local-mail/new
...
 $HOME/.local/share/local-mail/oldmails
 $HOME/.local/share/local-mail/oldmails/tmp
 $HOME/.local/share/local-mail/oldmails/cur
 $HOME/.local/share/local-mail/oldmails/new

When restarting kmail2, you will have a new subdirectory under Local Folders 
named oldmails with your all emails. It may take a time if the folder is big 
because it has to reindex all mails.

If you have some old kmail1 index files you need not to copy those.

Best,

Luis