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**molostoff** · Nov 14, 2011, 04:17 PM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

Originally posted by sanette

Do I really have to abandon kmail ?

First time just after unsuccessful migration I have got a sense that "this is the end".

But with simple (usual) manual config I have got it working well, and I see no problem at now. see also here for a link I have found regarding this subject.

**woodsmoke** · Nov 14, 2011, 07:00 PM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

Hi sanette.

I'm sorry that you are experiencing difficulties with Kmail.

As a test of your situation I did a fresh setup of Kmail in Kontact 4.7.2.

a) the setup for IMAP(particularly Gmail) is different than previous versions.
i) I had the normal "back and forth" problems with KDEwallet, and actually it seems that KDEwallet was being more recalcitrant than usual, but after maybe 5 attempts I got it setup using Kwallet. ii) The actual setup steps ...SEEM to be broken into two parts, first the receive and when one tries to send then the send setup appears.
My notes on the new setup are in the HowTo Thread under Kontact/Kamail and Gmail.

b)

* migration kmail -> I did not attempt this because I didn't have anything to migrate.

* the "search" tool doesn't work most of the time. You cannot select a particular folder (I have lots of folders Sad ), and randomly returns no results when I know there must be some.

For me the search function appears under Edit/find messages.

I selected a folder, in this case "Inbox".
Right clicked the folder and chose "find messages" and got a requestor box.
Ticked the radio button for Match any of the following.
Left "subject" in the first box, then contains "Christmas".
In the Search folder name I typed "Inbox" and then went up to click the search button(when I hit enter I got an error message).
I then saw the desired message that contained the word "Christmas" in the subject line.

* reply to several people doesn't work (no kidding !). Even for no more than 3 emails in the Cc I have a popup saying that the list of addresses was truncated to 2...

I attempted a message to three e-mail accounts and also to "reply" to one of them with "CC" to the others and all of them functioned.

As a note, I did see a new window which showed the three addresses in seperated boxes.

* random hangs with IMAP folders

I don't know what you call a "hang" but the initial setup of Kontact took about 45 (fourty-five) seconds to download the mail from Gmail.

Subsequents of the account took about 7 (seven) seconds.

* random error messages poping up from the task bar

i got a LOT of "error messages" that appeared in both the taskbar and popups during the initial setup. I also received two "different format" error messages in the taskbar these were particularly about DEwallet.. In the popup boxes there was pertinent information about the particular problem, for me all of it being the dratted Kwallet and then I forgot to set "clear text" for login.

I DID GET ERROR MESSAGES when I hit "enter" instead of clicking the search button.

So, this is all just to say that I was able to get it setup using Kubuntu desktop on an Oneric install using Kontact 4.7.2 so that you can see that at least one other person is able to get it running.

Points not covered.

i) random hangs and error messages. I will use this install for a few days to see what happens.
ii) I'm sorry that I couldn't do a migration of e-mails, but possibly somebody will pop(pun...POP3

) in and comment on that.

Hoping this helps a little bit.
woodsmoke

**sanette** · Nov 15, 2011, 02:12 AM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

Hi woodsmoke

thanks a lot for testing. Still, I am puzzled.
I have 3 IMAP accounts + the "local folders" which contains about 50 folders and subfolders. So I think it is a reasonable setup.

When I select one of the folders (IMAP or a local subfolder) I can do what you describe but it will show me results from other folders
(apparently, all other folders, but I am not sure about this)

In the older kmail there was an explicit field where you could select which folder to search, and if you wish to include subfolders. This has totally disappeared (

)

EDIT: I found another related message in a KDE forum, not very optimistic:
http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f...search#p205955

**sanette** · Nov 15, 2011, 02:19 AM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

concerning hangs or freeze, this is difficult to describe since it is random.

sometimes it is "OK" (see below)

sometimes when I click on a message it takes several seconds to show (even without big attachments)

sometimes when I click on a message I get a blue screen "Please wait", and then I can wait forever...
In this case I close kmail, reopen, and it would generally work after that

"OK" means reasonably responsive. But for instance in a folder that contains about 2000 messages, trying to drag the scroll bar in the list of messages is not smooth at all (regularly freezes for half a second or so). As a comparison, I have tried sylpheed and thunderbird with the same IMAP folder, and then scrolling the list was perfectly smooth.

**sanette** · Nov 15, 2011, 02:30 AM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

Hi woodsmoke

"I attempted a message to three e-mail accounts and also to "reply" to one of them with "CC" to the others and all of them functioned."

I'm not sure exactly what you did. The problem I have is the following:

I receive a message with several addresses in CC.
I want to answer to everybody. So I select "reply to all". Then in the compose window that pops up, I see that only one or 2 adresses are selected.
Sometimes (not always), I have a pop up message indicating that the list was truncated. Sometimes it crashes.

**sanette** · Nov 15, 2011, 02:42 AM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

Here is the popup that I get

(French)

It says "Sorry - Kontact

Truncating the list of addresses to 1 from 4 entries"

**woodsmoke** · Nov 16, 2011, 12:07 AM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

Sanette

Since, as you stated this is complex, I will attempt to reply as is within my means.

as to the reply to three people, I can see what you are stating, but I did not attempt that.

I replied to ONE person and CCd to two others.

I think that what I did was NOT analagous to what you did.

TO ANOTHER PERSON READING THIS.... if you could replicate what was done with Sanette then possibly the situation could be resolved.... I PERSONALLY cannot replicate this.

Concerning the "hangs or freezes"... yes that happens to me also, I do not think that it is PARTICULAR to Kmail, it seems to me to happen to other apps also and it MAY be that it is involved with the processing time/cycles that are also involved in the whole "plasma" thing... of that I do not know, but I have observed it also....again it may be somthing invovled with the hardware trying to process all of the varying types of information.

As to the popup. I am somewhat fluent in "Spanish" or "Hispanic" but not Francais. However from the translation of the popup, again, it seems to be associated with "processing power" or, in other words, possibly amount of memory allocated to the cache/temp file/memory the "system" was able to process three of the requests but not four.

I think that you are in a situation which is beyond my limited capalities and probably someone more expert than I should address the situation.

SO..............ANYONE ELSE?

woodsmoke

**sanette** · Nov 16, 2011, 08:03 AM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

Hmm, I just found out this post:

http://www.techquark.com/2011/11/bes...-detailed.html

so maybe, after all these years, still trying to use kmail is heroic... but maybe it's a good time to switch...

**woodsmoke** · Nov 16, 2011, 09:37 AM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

Hi Sanette.

That is a well done article and I read it with interest.

While using other distributions I used Thunderbird mostly but with Kubuntu I use Kmail because of the rest of the stuff in the Kontact suite.

I could see your comment in their discussion about importing but i don't do much of that because I leave almost all of my stuff on the cloud and delete on the cloud, except for really critical items so i don't have much to download or import in any case.

But, your original question had the term "professional basis" and I can see your point about Kmail being lacking.

The one complaint that i, particularly, have with Kontact is the "journal" which has, to me, a rather clumsy way of having to search through the dates to find a particular entry.

I commented on this in another thread where I outlined how I was attempting to use the journal app as a way to do my lesson plans for a new class, in that I am kind of doing them on the fly and the journal was to be a list of things that were changed etc. the journal, in and of itself, works ok except, as I said for searching in previous entries.

Again, you linked to a good article.

woodsmoke

**LinuxRocks** · Nov 16, 2011, 10:07 AM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

Just wanted to chime in here as I also use Kmail a lot.

My sister likes to send out these silly chain e-mails and they are usually addressed to lots of people (upwards of 15-20). Usually, I just read it and delete, however, this time, because of this post, I decided to reply to all - I did know most of the people, but some are probably scratching their heads

.

When I clicked the reply all button (Actually, had to hold down the reply button for a sec and let the reply all option appear) a new message window popped up and added all the e-mails into their own field. So it was like adding all the contacts one at a time if I was to do it manually.

I sent the message and didn't get any error messages or anything. I didn't get back any failure to send messages, although, one contact needs to clean out their personal inbox :-D.

So, I was successfully able to send a reply all to 18 people. I checked the sent folder and it looks to have sent to all of them. I also checked my e-mail logs (Postfix) and there were no issues there.

I do host my own e-mail server and "Smart Host" send smtp to my ISP, so there are no barriers to sending. Maybe your ISP is limiting how many people you can send to at one time, to protect against spam? That is why I use a smart host to send messages because my ISP blocks port 25 so I can't sent mail. Just a thought!

Searching is not something I do that much because I have a very good filing system I use for my mail (About 15k messages totally over 1.8 gigs of space) so I know right where to go when looking for a message. But I will test and see what happens.

BTW, I am using KDE 4.7.3 which improved the performance quite a bit for me in regards to the e-mail system.

Hope this helps!
Joe

**sanette** · Nov 16, 2011, 12:23 PM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

Hi LinuxRocks

so for you "reply to all" works as expected.

I don't believe this is a problem of the provider since it used to work before I upgraded to 11.10.

So I must have something in my config that causes this bug. But I really have no clue where it could be.

(I installed all my folders from scratch in kmail by creating new accounts and then using the import tool)

**sanette** · Nov 16, 2011, 12:24 PM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

I am seriously considering switching to thunderbird, but now I am facing the problem that importing all the kmail folder hierarchy to thunderbird mbox format seems really non easy...

**LinuxRocks** · Nov 16, 2011, 12:30 PM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

Originally posted by sanette

I am seriously considering switching to thunderbird, but now I am facing the problem that importing all the kmail folder hierarchy to thunderbird mbox format seems really non easy...

I like Thunderbird too and use that when using Gnome.

What I do, when not using my servers imap connection (Like now as its down with a bad hard drive :-D), is install a local imap server on your desktop, then copy all the mail to the imap folders. Then, fire up Thunderbird, connect to local imap and copy back.

You can even leave the local imap server installed and just connect to that for your mail. You can set up your imap directory in your home dir and it makes backing up mail a snap too

. This way, you can move back to kmail2 when you want to test out things or when there is an upgrade that may fix issues.

Typically, the default imap install works, but I do modify it some to my liking.

Check out - https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Dovecot

**sanette** · Nov 16, 2011, 01:51 PM

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

LinuxRocks: using a local imap server seems a very good idea. Thanks a lot for the suggestion.
I'm going to investigate this.

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