Switching directories from maildir to mbox in kmail 4.14.1

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Saturday May 18 2019 21:47:31 rhkramer at gmail.com wrote:

>> I need to switch them bo mbox -- how do I do that?
>
>
>I should add that I've done some googling, and found some instructions that 
>seem to imply the when I create a new folder, I should get a popup that has a 
>selection for mbox or maildir.  That doesn't popup on this system.
>
>Further, when I look at folder properties, I don't see an option to switch to 
>mbox.

Looking over the different agents I only see a single one that doesn't seem specific to the maildir format: the mbox agent. But that one will support only a single mbox, not a folder with any number of mbox files in it (if that's what you're after).

I have long used a different approach: I set up an imap server on the host where I want to archive my mail, and configure a directory for my email that's accessible over imap. I can do any kind of organisation of email into mail folders that I want, and know that each of those folders will be an mbox file at a known location on disk.
The only drawback with kmail and the like is that you need to jump through some hoops to prevent getting additional copies of that archived email in the akonadi database.
That, and akonadi doesn't support the usual imap server root directory property that Thunderbird and most other MUAs add on top of the imap standard. You will thus need an imap server that can be configured to serve a configurable location for each user rather than the user's home directory (because akonadi will happily try to index EVERYTHING under there).

R.