KMail is irretrievably broken

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hello.

Peter Humphrey - 13.09.17, 15:52:
> 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.

Do not import. If you ask me: That KMail 1 mail importer was a joke back then 
as I migrated… and I wouldn´t be surprised if it still is. Things started to 
work for me as I decided to not use it anymore. Sorry, if that sounds harsh, 
but I read more than enough stories of total failure of it doing anything 
useful.

- Make a backup.

- Point a maildir resource at the location of the mails of KMail 1 *or* move 
the directory where the old mails are stored to a new location like "~/.local/
share/local-mails" (meanwhile akonadi_maildir_resource_0 or another higher 
number) and point the maildir resource to that location.

- Let Akonadi reindex the stuff.

- Remove old KMail index files, they are no longer needed.


One caveat:

KMail 1 supported mixed maildir with mbox or maildir folders. If you used mbox 
folders, like I did for archival of old mails… either point a mixedmaildir 
resource (not recommended by upstream) at the KMail 1 mail directory *or* move 
the mbox stuff out of the way and either ignore those old mails or find another 
means to put these into Akonadi based maildir.

I initially used a mixedmaildir resource. But then separated maildir and mbox 
folder, removed the mixedmailddir resource, pointed a maildir resource at its 
location and I still have those old mail archives around, still not integrated 
into Akonadi, due to a bug in mixedmaildir resource which basically eats more 
than 8 GiB of RAM on trying to have it index those mails.

I hope that if KMail ever migrated to Sink developers will actually aim for 
actually *working* migration.

Thats the short version. We had this topic countless of times here… and I bet 
also in debian-kde. I need bed now.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin