Here's how I migrated away from kmail and why I almost failed: Man, what a sorry state today's email clients are in. How long is email around, 30 years? It seems, most modern clients still assume that you receive about 10 mail per day and that your folder structure is as complex as inbox and one or two additional folders. I guess that's because that what used to be email conversation has shifted more and more to facebook, twitter and the like. But let's start from the beginning: My distro (Slackware) stayed with kde 4.4 quite long, except some minor annoyances Kdepim did a good job for me and since I'm a long time kde user I saw no real reason to use something else. Recently .Slackware (in current) switched to 4.8 and I faithfully upgraded, since I never had major problems with kde. Now akonadi managed my mail and suddenly I could understand all the moaning in forums and lists. Mind you, the conversion went smooth and I still think that akonadi is not such a bad idea as long as we're talking about unifying resources, but the whole kmal2 experience became rather unpleasant. And that I was forced to use kwallet is a no-go. After I had my share of "akonadi_resource_bla is offline" and "Please wait, searching folder content" I decided, it was time to leave. So long and thank you for the fish.
The first step was to move my mail. Since I wanted to check several mail clients, the natural choice was IMAP. Surprisingly enough, kmail did a good job moving my 10,000+ mails to my provider's server. I have 5GB mail space, so no sweat. Filtering incoming mails to folders is done on the server, but I need some post-processing, like folder-dependent handling of mails, based on age or sender, a job kmail did quite well. Next step was collecting a list of potential replacements for kmail, preferably with PIM features, but that was not mandatory. So I came up with Thunderbird (the obvious candidate), Mutt, Zimbra (just to check) and claws-mail. Evolution is not an option, because Slackware does not include Gnome. The first I checked was Thunderbird 13.01. Wow, that was funny: I use Thunderbird quite often as a quick and dirty way to check my emails from MS computers, because it's easy to setup and easy to remove after use, but that was completely different now, first it's rather slow with IMAP, second it's ugly and third it's mail management is really limited. I.e. to convince Thunderbird to check all folders for new mail, I had to tweak about:config. I guess thers's probably an option in the config dialogs, but I couldn't find it. But the real show stopper was the folder management. There are options for encoding and syncing and quotas, but processing mails by status is limited to age and actions are limited to delete or not delete. Something like in kmail, "Move messages older than 30 days to archive" is simply not possible. Use filters, I hear you say. Yeah, good idea, but here's the catch: Thunderbird can do automatic filtering only on incoming mails! Filters on mails in folders have to be applied manually. At that point, I decided Thunderbird is not for me. Why is this thing so popular, even in business environments? It's a toy, not more. Next try, Mutt: I always liked Mutt, probably because of the challenge, but it became apparent very quickly, that it would need a lot of effort, getting Mutt fit for today's email requirements. Not the processing but the displaying of messages is the problem. Nowadays people tend to sent emails in all kind of formats with all kind of attached media and you want to see that stuff right away. I'm sure Mutt can do this, but currently the effort is too big for me. Zimbra: Next one. No, seriously, what's that supposed to be. I guess there's some vision behind, but I don't get it. At this point desperation set in. It seemed , there wasn't a feasible replacement for kmail, which would suit my needs. Enter claws-mails: It's not pretty, some of it's configuration seems a bit odd, PIM is limited to a vCalendar-plugin, but it's doing the job. There's nothing I did in kmail I can't do in claws-mail and I guess there are a lot of things it can do that kmail doesn't. And yes, you can use vim as editor ;-) It seems claws-mail, mutt and probably Evolution are the only programs able to handle complex mail requirements. Kmail could be in that list, if it wasn't for it's present shape. So if you're looking for a kmail replacement, have a look at claws-mail. For me it seems to be the best option for kmail power users. Joerg ___________________________________________________ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.
