I am thinking of migrating my laptop from Kmail1 to Kmail2. I don't *really* have to do this yet, but I'd rather attempt one more time to move to Kmail2 while not under duress, because bitrot or maintainers decisions may force my hand sooner or later anyway.
I have made half a dozen attempts over the years, most with very poor results. Thankfully I was not hit by the bug that deleted most of Alan's emails, at the early days of KDEPIM4. However, my experiences can be summarised as follows: 1. Attempts to migrate my old emails to Kmail2 ended up never completing satisfactorily. Duplicate emails, not syncing Sent messages, etc. were some of the symptoms. I blamed the hardware at the time, which was a really anaemic old 32bit laptop. At least one account (Gmail) was POP3 and I wanted to keep it this way. It never really worked properly, duplicating messages and multiplying them every time I deleted one of the duplicate messages. In a couple of days the installation was unusable. I rinsed and repeated from backups, with the same unsatisfactory results. I deleted all accounts and recreated them afresh (rather than migrating the existing messages on the disk) but this was plagued by the same problems. Eventually I gave up and went back to Kmail1. 2. A couple of years later, I had another go with Kmail2, but this time I decided to use IMAP4, on an Acer with a dual core chip and 4GB RAM. Thankfully, there were no dupes, no mail corruption, or loss. I ended up blaming a poor implementation of POP3 or Gmail for previous problems. However, with my large number of messages, it would still take for ever to sync folders (Gmail labels). Email accounts with less than 1,000 messages did not seem to have a problem syncing withing a reasonable time. I had a couple of akonadi/mysql corruptions too. On a laptop the concept of having to wait in excess of an hour for your Gmail Inbox to sync with the server is not a practical proposition. However, leaving it overnight to sync everything usually would result in a working mail client. I say usually, because occasionally mysql would peg one CPU core to 100% and kmail would freeze for anything up to 40 minutes at a time. The whole interface would freeze whenever it was syncing a folder. 3. I set up Kmail2 on an old 32bit desktop for my wife. Kmail2 was similarly unresponsive while syncing folders and while akonadi was doing its indexing on mysql. I reverted it back to Kmail1. 4. I set up Kmail2 on a modern desktop (quad-core with 16GB RAM) for my wife's multiple email accounts, all with less than 1,000 messages. Over the period of a year she experienced a couple of akonadi/mysql corruptions, from which her installation recovered fully, after I removed the akonadi databases and let it recreate them. Kmail2 is being used daily without her reporting any other problems with it. So I decided to delete a lot of old messages to slim my Gmail down and have another go with Kmail2. However, I am still unsure from my experimentation if the intermittent nature of a network connection of a laptop will cause any problems with Kmail2 and its akonadi architecture. Have you been able to use Kmail2 reliably on a *laptop*? What problems have you experienced? Has intermittent network availability caused loss of messages? Any gotchas and workarounds? Any suggestions? -- Regards, Mick
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