KMail is irretrievably broken

[Martin Steigerwald]

Hello Peter.

Peter Humphrey - 14.09.17, 15:07:
> On Thursday, 14 September 2017 10:04:05 BST you wrote:
[…]
> > As far as I recall I've seen reports about this duplicate emails issue
> > since the 4.1x days meaning that the versions I'm still using aren't
> > immune. Yet I've never seen any sign of it (that wasn't due to the way
> > GMail imap folders work). I do sometimes have an issue where email seems
> > to get lost and newly received email doesn't show up. Annoying, but I
> > only have to quit Kontact, do `akonadictl fsck`, possibly an akonadi
> > restart and things work again.
> 
> Yes, me too. Since the onset of plasma, though, they're considerably worse,
> and not just in number.

I am sad that there are still such reports of such massive bugs with even most 
recent versions like this:

> Sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.12.5, but 4.12.12 from today
> KDE-plasma-5.10.4-r1, but 5.10.5 from today
> kde-apps/kmail-17.04.3

Some questions that may give you some pointers:

Which version is Akonadi itself? Maybe it is out of sync? (I bet emerge should 
take care of that, but I don´t know much about Gentoo.)

Your mails lack output and logfiles. Is there anything suspicious in 
~/.xsession-errors or console output in case you start akonadi and kmail from 
there, anything suspicious in 

- ~/.local/share/akonadi/akonadiserver.error
- ~/.local/share/akonadi/db_data/mysql.err (or log of PostgreSQL db if you use 
that)

Also what size are your accounts approximately?

It is sad to see that Akonadi is still such a major pain point for quite some 
users as mails to this and other mailinglists as well as bug reports show. 
Even more than 5 years after it was introduced.

I´d tend to think that 5 years and more could be enough to stabilize a PIM 
information infrastructure, yet it appears for… Akonadi this does not seem to 
be the case, at least not with the time the few current developers manage to 
dedicate on it.

That said: For me Akonadi + KMail basically works just nice. For a long time 
already. I know the struggles you are going through, but I didn´t have any 
major struggles since at least more than a year.

However, I am still on KMail + Akonadi 16.04. Maxy from Debian Qt/KDE team 
prepared KDEPIM + Akonadi 17.08 recently, but it still has to go through NEW 
queue. I hope… that upgrading to it will not cause any regressions to the 
versions I am currently running. But I like to review at least one bug about 
recent Akonadi + recent MariaDB that I saw popping up recently.

> Maybe I should try yet another "emerge -e world." It doesn't seem to have 
> done any good before, though. I could try Luis Felipe's idea too. If I
> could  find a satisfactory alternative to KMail, together with a
> practicable way to export and import, I would.

Yes, KMail is just so good as a mail client, that I never dumped *despite* of 
the tons of trouble I went through with Akonadi. I´d say Akonadi was the 
single most annoying troublespot in Plasma/KDE Application in the recent 
years. Well except maybe the Nepomuk stuff, which is gone for good.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin