E-Mails are cleared out from IMAP-folders after mailbox migration

[Ingo Klöcker]

On Dienstag, 30. September 2025 15:53:54 Mitteleuropäische Sommerzeit Thomas 
Hejze wrote:
> > > System: kdepim/akonadi binary packages of a standard OpenSuse 15.6
> > > installation, version: 23.08.5, release bp156.1.3.
> > 
> > This version is 2 years old. The current version is 25.08.1.
> 
> Maybe, but this is the version OpenSuse ships for their distro 15.6, the
> OpenSuse development communitiy considers that version as stable.

Yes, it's stable. The upside of using a distribution like openSUSE Leap is 
that most applications receive little or no major updates so that nothing can 
break. The downside is that most applications will receive little or no 
bugfixes either. I'm using openSUSE Tumbleweed which receives loads of updates 
all of the time. Occasionally, something breaks. Most of the time it's quickly 
fixes with the next round of updates. Both approaches have their pros and cons.

I do remember that there was a severe bug in KMail when you moved multiple 
messages. It looked as if all messages had been moved to the new location but 
in reality only the first message had been moved successfully. I think this bug 
was fixed long before the version you are using but I'm not sure. Copying 
multiple messages worked without problems.

> Do you
> think the data (emails) management system has undergone major changes from
> 23.08 to 25.08?

Under the hood there have been major changes because all KDE apps were ported 
from Qt 5 to Qt 6. Apart from that quite a few bugs have been fixed.

> > Maybe it helps if you create the folders manually on the new server and
> > then copy the mails from the local folders to the remote folders one
> > folder at a time.
> 
> That's what I did. In my Webmail interface I created a parallel tree
> structure, say instead of folder "ABC" I created a folder "ABC___ " (for
> each affected folder). Then in contact I copied the messages of the
> affected folders to their destination. This time the messages remained.
> They even remained when I moved them to their target destination (i.e.
> ABC___ -> ABC).
> 
> So the problem seems to be solved for the moment.

That's good to hear.

> Still I have a bad
> feeling, considering that E-Mails might vanish without actively deleting
> them.

That's understandable. Obviously, this should never happen, but moving implies 
deleting at the old location.

> Some of the emails I have been keeping for more than fifteen years.
> I'd probably notice that they are gone not before I start searching for
> them. I think, I will make more frequent use of the vailable backup tools
> such as pimsettingexporter.

Yes, backups are important. I'm not sure if pimsettingexporter is the best 
tool for this, but any tool is better than no backup.

> > Otherwise, the best advice I can give you is to try a newer version of
> > KMail. A slow-moving distribution like yours may have some advantages, but
> > the fact that it provides super old versions of applications which will
> > never receive any bugfixes is rather a disadvantage.
> 
> I have been using SuSE/OpenSuse over decades, since a friend persuaded me to
> give Linux a chance. As to their versions of applications philosophy, well,
> it's their philosophy and a lot of people put in much effort and time to
> provide us a stable desktop distribution, which is easy to work with.

Yes, and that's fine. I'm also using openSUSE since decades. The only difference 
is that I chose the always-bleeding-edge Tumbleweed over the stable Leap. 
Since I'm developing KDE apps for me the always-bleeding-edge variant is the 
better choice.

> There are thousands of packages. To be honest, kdepim is the part which
> gives me most of the headaches among these.

Yes. Sadly, KDE PIM gets way too little love. Only very few people are working 
on those apps.

Regards,
Ingo
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