All local folders lost in KMail

[Peter Humphrey]

On Friday, 16 August 2019 15:27:52 BST Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Peter Humphrey - 14.08.19, 16:50:12 CEST:
> > On Friday, 9 August 2019 16:05:30 BST you wrote:
> > > Change of plan again; the overclocking made no difference, so I
> > > followed various guides on the Web and interpreted them for my
> > > Gentoo system.
> > > 
> > > I had to reinstall akonadi and qt-sql with USE=postgres, but after
> > > setting up for pgsql I restarted akonadi, then reimported the mail
> > > archive I'd remembered to make.  ;)
> > > 
> > > Let's see how it goes. Thanks all for your help.
> > 
> > Well, that was a disaster. I've now lost two whole days of e-mails.
> > Postgres seemed to be faster than MySql, but at what cost!
> > 
> > I lost yesterday's mails because KMail decided it would save my daily
> > archive under my home directory instead of in a separate partition
> > mounted below there. So when I removed my home directory and created
> > a new one, again, the archive was lost. One day down.
> 
> Well, when KMail archives to home directory and you remove that… that is
> the expected outcome, I'd say. I do not see how KMail/Akonadi would be
> responsible for that data loss.

Yes, of course, but its behaviour changed, and with the restricted width of 
the archiving dialogue box I didn't notice the change.

> > Today I had some more new mails waiting to be read, but I did
> > something else first on another desktop and when I came back to KMail
> > I watched in horror as it proceeded to delete all my folders and
> > messages. Another day's mails lost.
> 
> I have really no clue what is going on on your system. And without more
> information I see not much of a chance to find out.
> 
> However, one thing I like to share (again, I mentioned it often in this
> list, cause it is really a classic) is:
> 
> Akonadi misconception #1: where is my data?
> 
> https://blogs.kde.org/2011/11/13/akonadi-misconception-1-where-my-data
> 
> Which basically means that your mails could still be in the filesystem,
> somewhere under '~/.local/share' usually, where is somewhere would be
> 'local-mail' or 'akonadi_something_resource', at least for POP3. The
> resource configuration dialog in Akonadiconsole would tell the location.
> For IMAP they could theoretically still be on the IMAP server.
> 
> It is really important to understand that before claiming that mails may
> be lost. Of course mails disappearing from KMail for no good reason
> would still be a bug, but it might (!) not be a data loss.

I kept the old user account and searched it for phrases like folder names and 
email addresses, but nothing showed up.

> Some more of the information in such a data loss case would be:

I've given up on those lost messages, but I'll follow your suggestions from 
now on.

--->8

> Please understand that I do have a lot of other things more important to
> me, so I am currently not willing to describe in detail on how to gather
> this information, it would just take more time than I am willing to
> spend. So please see on your own how you can provide this information.
> Of course feel free to ask for help on this list. I just may not answer
> in a timely manner or at all. But there are others who can help as well.

Roger, wilco.

> In case you provided any of this information already, feel free to point
> me to it. From quickly scanning mails in this thread I did not see it.
> 
> Best of success,

Thanks.  :)

-- 
Regards,
Peter.