ok, maybe i won't find any devs to back akonadi out of kde-pim after all

[Martin Steigerwald]

Paul Vixie - 18.03.18, 15:41:
> when i was last able to use kmail as my every day mailer, i learned all
> the keyboard chords, and worked across multiple accounts with thousands
> of folders with millions of messages, plus calendaring, plus pgp, all
> without taking my hands off the home row of my QWERTY. it was the most
> efficient, most intelligently designed, the most visually pleasing,
> messaging work flow i've ever seen or used.
> 
> it was better than mh and mh-e, which i would have said wasn't possible.
> 
> i have been a wandering refugee ever since akonadi came. my current
> daily e-mail tool is "postbox" which is a later invention by the
> original "thunderbird" team. i now launch kontact only for pgp.

I am sorry that you aren´t able to use KMail + other KDEPIM apps in this way. 
I am not sure why that is for you...

I am certainly able to and I use KMail extensively on both my private and my 
work related user account. Each week I skim through a ton of mails, partly 
from mailing lists, and I write several dozen mails myself on busy weeks. You 
can check mail agent header on the mails I write here: All written in KMail. 
While this folder currently just has 12130 mails as I archived years of older 
mails from it, I do have folders with more than 50000 mails, sometimes more 
than 100000 mails here. I basically "live" in KMail and I am happy that I now 
found that for some web forums I do visit sometimes I now found the option to 
switch them to mailing list mode, cause I just prefer having it all inside 
KMail (well and Akregator, which is not yet Akonadi based, but works well 
enough for me as well).

It was not always this way. The first Akonadi based KDEPIM versions, 
especially KMail have been a major challenge for me. I suffered a lot. I felt 
like giving up on it a dozen times easily. And I still kept it. Except for a 
few short periods of time where KMail did not work at all for me I used 
Thunderbird, always so happy when being able to go back.

I am with KMail as my main mail client for more than 10 years. Am I married to 
it? Probably not. But I am quite reluctant to even think about moving my mail 
setup to something else. I configured it exactly the way I want it and most of 
the time the whole things just works. My private KMail easily has more than 
100 filter rules and 200 folders. Its a crazy, if not insane setup. I reduced 
the work related setup quite a bit, cause Exchange simply could not handle it, 
while Zimbra had no issues dealing with tons and tons of mails and folders.

There are issues at some time and I sometimes still do a akonadictl restart, 
although I am quite confident that most of the time Akonadi would just need 
some time to get back to me – sometimes I just do not want to wait this long. 
Also I still have issues with mail indexing for my huge private mail setup. 
Currently akonadi_indexing_agent goes about reindexing all mail folders there, 
cause it for some reason does not think it has indexed them already which it 
has. This drags down the performance of this nice laptop with dual SSD BTRFS 
RAID 1 – BTRFS may easily affect the performance negatively, as database based 
workloads suffer on it, even on SSDs – + 16 GiB RAM a lot. At the moment I 
just killall the process until Akonadi does not restart it anymore in that 
case. Once I have upgraded to KDEPIM 17.12 I want to remove that more than 6 
GiB large search_db folder and let it have one go at reindexing everything 
from scratch. Dan also has a plan about improving this. The current way the 
indexing works unfortunately is highly, highly inefficient.

So its certainly not perfect for me, but definitely usable. I am sad that it 
does not seem to work out for you at the moment. You may want to describe your 
setup, maybe I or others have some tips for you to consider. I do use MariaDB 
with 1 GiB of InnoDB buffer pool size and in my subjective impression this 
helps a lot with performance. I usually notice it quite quickly when Akonadi 
overwrites this change to the MySQL configuration due to an update.

If you choose to describe your setup, I suggest you do it in a new thread.

Time for bed for me.

Thanks,
-- 
Martin