Upgraded to kmail2--mostly successful but that unpleasant

[Michael Hirsch]

So I finally upgraded kubuntu this week.  I went from 11.04 to 11.10 to
12.04.  In the middle I only booted long enough to start the upgrade--I
didn't test to see if everything worked.

It seems to have gone fairly smoothly, except for kmail.  kmail wouldn't
start, and would tell me to run the upgrader interactively, but when I ran
it it would say it had already run.  I
deleted ~/.kde4/share/config/kmail-migratorrc and it ran, supposedly
successfully, but then kmail would not run.

Following some internet sleuthing, I deleted ~/.kde/share/apps/akonadi
and ~/.config/akonadi and my .kmail2rc and it finally ran, and even figured
out some of my email accounts.  But all my mail is missing!

There is a File->Import Messages menu item that looks promising.  Maybe I
can import all my emails and then I will be able to read them.  There is a
likely sounding "Import KMail Maildirs and Folder Structure" item in a
drop-down.  Of course, it warns me not to import ~/Mail, which is where my
mail is, but I think it is just confused.  Why should it worry about
infinitely looping on importing mail when kmail now stores my mail in a
mysql database?

There is a funny warning that I don't really understand: "Since it is
possible to recreate the folder structure, the folders will be stored
under: "KMail-Import" in your local folder."  Should that be "Since it is
impossible..."?  I still don't understand, but oh well.  I'll try it.

So I click the button below "Please select the folder to import to" and
choose to import to a subfolder in my local email.

The next part is a disaster.  I have hundreds of email folders, and the
dialog makes me start over for each one.  So I have to pick where to import
to, then navigate to a folder and select it.  Ultimately I find that I can
multi-select all my mbox folders at once and do a big import.  They get
imported into folders named MBOX-oldname.  Why they developer thinks I care
that they used to be in mbox format I can't imagine.  Now I have to go
rename them all, but at least they loaded quickly.

Now I still have lots of slightly newer maildir folders to import.  It
takes me a long time to realize that if never actually lets me select a
maildir folder and say okay.  If I select a folder the dialog enters that
folder showing the sub-folders.  Finally, I just give up and I click "okay"
when I've entered the folder in question with nothing inside selected.
 Wow, it actually starts importing all my folders.

Moronically, it is putting every folder into a KMail-import folder, but I
guess I was warned.  I still don't understand why it would do that.

So, I guess the upshot is that it worked, mostly.  I still get the
heebie-jeebies at the thought of keeping all my mail in mysql instead of
easily to read mbox and maildir folders, and I have all my folders named
stupidly, but it looks like I haven't lost my mail.  That's good.

This has probably been the worst upgrade experience I've had in my almost
20 years of running Linux.  I can't believe that anyone thought this was a
good idea, or that it was ready to use.  Since I got past the kmail
crashing instantly it has only crashed twice--but I've only been running it
a couple of hours.

Let's hope that no more big changes are coming.

Michael
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kubuntu-users/attachments/20120914/1976abd8/attachment.html>