In the unlikely event you’re keeping track of this, slashing the total volume of email made Kmail much more competent: it hadn’t trashed an index file in, oh, weeks…
Until it happened again.
I don’t know that 30 days of email is magic, but 64 MB worked much better than 3 GB. The offending folder has all of 6 MB and 280 files, which puts a pathetic upper bound on Kmail’s good behavior.
Anyhow, Kmail still screws up its indexes, but … it’s better than it was.
You’d think this would be an important thing to get right, but the KDE apparat has far more important things to worry about. Eye candy, as nearly as I can tell.
I use Kmail because it’s one of the few email readers that stores messages in maildir format. That’s important with large email collections, because mbox, the other choice, tucks all the messages into a single honkin’ big file (perhaps one file per folder). That doesn’t work well with a daily backup strategy, because each message changes the file and triggers a backup of the whole thing. Maildir format means backing up only the new messages, which makes far more sense.
But, if this blank email thing continues, it’s time to move on…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
7 responses to “Kmail: FAIL”
Evolution keeps one-mail-per-file (at least in IMAP, i dont use POP), tho it’s not bug-free (but its getting better)
at least in IMAP, i dont use POP
Our ISP serves POP, so that’s what we use; Evolution’s POP routines fetch into mbox files…
I set Evolution up another machine to see how it works, then had to convert a stack of maildir files into mbox. Getting rid of the whole Kmail infrastructure dramatically improved things, but one mbox file is a 45-MB hulk that gets updated once a day and that’s just not good for daily backups.
A dovecot installation may be in order to get a local IMAP server… bleh!
mutt works fine with maildir and is generally pretty suck-free.
and is generally pretty suck-free
I think that’s pretty much by definition, isn’t it?
Alas, going back to a bare-bones text-mode email client just isn’t going to happen. I know some folks who swear by it, but …
text-mode i’ll accept, but i object vociferously to ‘bare-bones’. I’d be very surprised if there’s anything kmail can do that mutt can’t do better. :P
Uh, screw up indexes? [grin]
Hah! I’ll grant you that one. IRTE. :)