about kmail2 and UDS considerations

[Rob Hall]

Your lucky.. I've been battling with kmail2 since it was first added to the 
kubuntu experimental ppa for Natty. My usage pattern is probably significantly 
different to a lot of users and the shear quantity of email I receive is 
probably a factor. For a start I use IMAPS connecting to a Kolab server which 
hosts a lot of shared folders. Some of the folders hold in excess of 10K 
emails. This is due to company policy which dictates a 6 month expiry on a lot 
of emails such as logwatch reports and these can be quite large emails, so we 
have quantity in numbers and size. I work remotely most of the time so I have 
all mail cached localy.

Problems so far. 

Migration from kmail - never got this to work and eventually just downloaded 
all email again.
DB corruption - Akonadi/mysql managed to corrupt itself - redownload all email 
(which can be a couple of days of a job).
Sent emails - disappearing into a black hole.
Performance - Opening large email folders can take an age. Go away make a 
coffee and come back to PC age (and it's not a low spec PC but a dual quad core 
with 16GB of RAM and a SCSI+SAS disc subsytem with hardware RAID).
Astonomical CPU Usage - Nepomuk using 300% CPU (ie 3 full CPU cores on an 8 
core machine). Now disabled nepomuk but akonadi complains every boot.
Inactivity/lack of feedback - Press Check mail and have kmail2 do nothing. No 
indication of anything happening, no error messages, no progress bars.. Zip.. 

kmail2/akonadi is not production ready in my case. Not even close. I've now 
bitten the bullet and left kmail2 behind on my works account switching to 
Thunderbird. I'll continue to use kmail2 on my personal account (Nepomuk 
disabled) which seems to be behaving itself so far. 

UnfortunatelyI haven't been able to reliably reproduce a lot of the issues so 
I can't file useful bug reports upstream.

It annoys me when people state that part of the problem is a lack of manpower 
when some of the recent commits to kmail2 have been adding features rather 
than fixing the multitude of problems with the base project. Surely if kmail2 
is that short of developers all hands should be bug fixing until it's 
stabilised and new features should not be accepted into the codebase? 

> so, i just tried kmail 2 to help bugger it.  Got no problems here.  dunno
> what he's spoutin off about.
> 
> On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 7:14 PM, Markus Slopianka 
<markus.s at kdemail.net>wrote:
> > On Donnerstag 13 Oktober 2011 20:01:14 KP Kirchdoerfer wrote:
> > > This can't be justified by an "understaffed team", if so, just don't
> > > do
> > 
> > it
> > 
> > > and users have to wait another year.
> > 
> > Yes, it can if there aren't even enough people to maintain two branches
> > at the same time.
> > 
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-- 
Regards,

Rob Hall