K-Mail in Kontact @ Kubuntu 10.10: IMAP and Address Book.

[Reinhold Rumberger]

On Thursday 11 November 2010, Bas. G. Roufs M.A. wrote:
> What exactly is the difference between "disconnected" and "normal"
> IMAP? So far, I did not find anywhere an answer to this question.

I don't think you can have looked very thoroughly - disconnected will 
keep a local copy of the remote IMAP account, so that you can access 
your account even when you don't have internet access. It also has 
some advantages on a highly unstable connection like mine, since I 
won't have to wait through several connection attempts until a 
message download succeeds.

As far as the timeout thing is concerned: depending on the amount of 
messages you have and how reliable your internet connection is, this 
may happen. Usually, KMail should simply be able to use the partial 
message list. Simply cancel the action and try again.
It you have a large amount of messages, and a cluster of them are big 
messages (say, several MBs), disconnected mode may stall a little. 
Just let the first synchronisation process run overnight.

Also, you should be aware that KMail's IMAP implementation is 
somewhat minimalist and brittle. I run into trouble when I re-tag a 
large amount of messages in google's gmail interface as KMail has to 
download them all, but after a couple of attempts it usually 
succeeds.

  --Reinhold