The New Hotness

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…