Kmail, again

[jlittle]

With Cosmic, I've tried to use Kmail with gmail, again, and have failed, again.

One hurdle I hit and eventually stumbled over was a little window (about 50 mm wide and 30 mm high) that only had a button saying "100%". I presumed it had finished 100% of whatever it was doing, and dismissed it repeatedly. Through luck I stumbled on resizing it to find a Google password prompt.

But Kmail insists on downloading my "All mail". This has mail since I started with gmail a decade or so ago, and has several GB of stuff. I can't have this clogging things up, taking up space on my SSD, bloating my backups, but akonadi starts to choke on it and Kmail slows to unusability. I got the impression that it was coping better than the last time I tried, reportedly some mysql configuration has been improved.

So, I remembered some advice (here on KFN) and installed Thunderbird. That was ok, till I realized that it was downloading the all mail too, maybe after I moved something to it. #&@£!

Searching Thunderbird support I formed the idea that this is the way IMAP works, and gmail's tagging system isn't a good fit with IMAP's folder structure.

If that's right, my trouble with Kmail is not caused by Kmail. I essentially don't want IMAP.

Is there a mail client that won't see "all mail" as a folder to download? Thunderbird "folder subscriptions" sound promising, but gmail will always have "all mail" as a tag, I don't think one can remove it from anything.

Is there a way to tame this ~10 GB problem?

Is there a mail client or site that can talk HTTP to gmail, the way the gmail web page does?

Regards, John Little

[GreyGeek]

Antifreeze has the same problem
https://www.kubuntuforums.net/showth...ith-korganizer

[Rod J]

I've used Thunderbird for years now and it's easy to limit what mail Thunderbird downloads from IMAP accounts (I use Gmail IMAP myself).

When first running Thunderbird after setting it up with my account info I usually take it offline immediately to stop it downloaded everything as you have been experiencing (especially if you have a really fast internet connection).

Then go into Preferences, Account Settings, Synchronization & Storage. In "Disk Space", "Synchronize the most recent" I usually change this to 120 Days but choose whatever you think suitable. If you have very large messages you can limit those too. Thunderbird will still download the IMAP headers for all mail (size is negligible even with thousands of emails) but only the full emails respecting the limits above.

Later, if you happen to click on an email that is older than the number of Days/Weeks/Months you chose above it will just download the particular email selected and nothing else.

[jlittle]

That sounds very promising, thank you. I'll give it a try tomorrow.

Regards, John Little

[jlittle]

I've been using Thunderbird for nearly a couple of months now, and I mostly like it; it does the job, and downloading only the headers is what I need.

Today, though, Thunderbird 60.2.1 started crashing on starting, every time on the profile I've been using, including its safe mode. I blundered about uselessly for a while, but eventually downloaded the latest tarball, for version 60.4. It runs ok, and found the default profile with all the account set-up in place. It reset the layout a bit. However, it fixed what was wrong with the profile, now 60.2.1 starts.