kmail sigh

[Sandro Knauß]

Hey,

I was pissed from your first email, because you don't mentioned any useful 
information - just "it is broken". And this "When can we have akonadi-free 
kmail?" only triggers flamewars - Come on - help us to improve things - 
Akonadi is mostly not the bad guy. But the issue of syncing every piece of 
data is a real hard one and compared to other solutions Akonadi is not worse 
than other solutions. I could tell stories of broken thunderbird installations 
too. But I ranting, do not improve things!

Just ranting around - is not a very good way to get useful responses. You 
second mail has much more details, so now I'm willing to help you. See in the 
past I often tried to help people by mail or chat and than after putting a lot 
of effort into helping, the people respond later, that they switched to 
thunderbird in meanwhile, so all my hours trying to help were lost...

One important information is still missing from your side - what version of 
kmail you are using and what distro. You may hit issues that are already 
solved with an uptodate version.

> I have 3 accounts, the mandatory "Local folders" that is unused, my main
> account (IMAP) which has quite a lot og mail (15000 or so), and a very low
> traffic second IMAP account.

okay IMAP is fine. 15000 mails is not very uncommon for the kdepim devs as 
test scenario and they also try to optimize for those amount of mails.

> When clicking the "check new mail" button, kmail seems to be very busy with
> tons of small actions, the main folder taking considerable time. Like it
> runs through all the mail allready there? Or downloading the entire folder
> and comparing? I don't know, but it is slow (like 30 secs in all).

Mmh for me I don't see this long waiting issue. But if Akonadi cache fails to 
upload one change for your side (like you moved out/in one mail into a folder 
and Akonadi couldn't sync it, why so ever) than Akonadi will download the 
complete list of mails again.  The "fun part" is that it doesn't help to 
delete the cache for the folder, as Akonadi wants to make sure nothing get 
lost, Akonadi will not delete those mails, that are not got uploaded, as 
Akonadi knows they are uniquly exist on this only computer and Akonadi do not 
want to throw away anything. This behaviour you describe - I see sometimes  
for my Junk folder, too. Itis known, but the proper solution is really hard. 
But we are on it :D

Okay the workaround is to get rid of mails, that are blocking the proper sync.
akonadictl fsck will show you a list of elements without a RID (remote ID) , 
these are those elements, that are not got uploaded to the server. But till 
know fsck only report those things and to not delete them. This part you have 
to do on your own via akonadiconsole.

> Clicking a mail often leads to a pause, filled by the kmail/akonadi BSOD,
> before the mail is finally fetched. Like all softs of other stuff needs to
> be done first?! In any web client, mail shows immediately when the header
> in the list is clicked.

Well one issue could be the broken sync and that every click triggers a 
complete resync of the folder, that can lead to those long waiting sessions. 
The other thing can be an issue inside the db or Akonadi. Here it would help a 
lot if you can look in top/htop or any system monitor, if a process consume 
much CPU while you wait for displaying one email. As the Database process are 
transparent visible, it should be easy for you to distinguish between database 
and Akonadi. With versions < 17.08 the sorting/grouping process was done live 
in kmail after Akonadi gave all informations about mails in a folder. With 
more recent version, the sorting/grouping is save in Akonadi, too so changing 
folders got a lot faster.

The other thing is, you you have the "normal" IMAP than mails are retrieved 
live from the server, so if a not very fast I-Net connection this can take a 
little bit longer to see one mail. But this is a time, that Akonadi can not 
optimize - Webmailer normaly have a very fast connection to the IMAP Server, 
that's why they can interact fast with the IMAP Server. Do you enabled 
"Download all message for offline use" in the accounts settings, than only the 
data needs to be delived from Akonadi to mail, and this is done in notime.

> This is not new, for me the new thing is that I can actually read my mail at
> all using kmail. Still, I do not understand why it has to be so slow.

Hopefully some background knowledge, that may help to improve your situation. 
There are also people, that have optimized their mysql instance for mails with 
specific values. For me the response time is fast enough.

> I have used kmail since KDE 1.12, more or less, albeit since the akonadi
> disaster, I had two long pauses (using thunderbird in the first and claws
> mail in  the second, recent one). I love kmail, but it is hard in recent
> years.

I love kmail even more than in the "good old times". If I hear the stories 
about the code quality and issues in old kmail... It is more a miracle, that 
the old kmail didn't eat all of you emails. 

> During setup a few weeks ago, I experienced that popups blocked me from
> filling in my information, and while the "identity" concept is smart in
> many ways, as an owner of more mail accounts, one needs to KNOW that kmails
> defaults are broken, it does not automatically use the correct delivery
> account, and creating the second account, it makes that identity the
> default without asking. Etc.

Did you use the Account Wizard (Settings->Add Account...) for creating all the 
accounts?

hefee