Re: How do I turn off automatic compaction but still allow manual?

Hi Ingo,

thanks for the info.  I have already started that process.

I began with the largest and/or most frequently used folders.  Things seem to 
have settled a lot since that.

Regards,

David.


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On Thu, 6 Aug 2009 08:03:33 Ingo Klöcker wrote:
> On Wednesday 05 August 2009, David Mills wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I used to have kontact and kmail that came with kde 3.5.9.  I'm sure
> > that there was an option to turn on/off automatic periodic compaction
> > for all folders.
>
> No. There never was such an option.
>
> > I have just upgraded to kde 4.2.4.  Kmail now hangs for long periods
> > of time and chews through 100% CPU.  I can only suspect it was doing
> > compaction.  It seemed to be doing it several times a day.
> >
> > I have a lot of folders with a lot of email so this process was
> > taking a lot of time and chewing through most of my computer's
> > resources.  At one point the kmail process got to 6 GB of memory used
> > and I wasn't able to do much else with the computer.
> >
> > I cannot find a way to turn off automatic compaction with this new
> > version - so I have set "Compactable=false" for all my folders in the
> > kmailrc file. This seems to have fixed the issue of kmail using 100%
> > CPU for long periods of time.  But now I am unable to compact folders
> > even manually.
> >
> > How can I get manual operating but not automatic?  Or even better,
> > automatic only to operate on a few select folders (i.e. the ones I
> > use most)?
>
> I cannot really add much to what you have already found yourself.
> Setting "Compactable=false" disables compaction completely. It is set
> by KMail in case a possible problem with the index files is detected.
> This is done in order to prevent the loss of mail during compaction due
> to broken index files.
>
> Unless you have really good reasons to keep using mbox folders I suggest
> to convert all folders to maildir format. This will solve the problem
> of compaction since maildir folders do not need to be compacted.
> Unfortunately, there's no easy way to convert a folder from mbox format
> to maildir format. One way to do it is to create a new folder in
> maildir format, move (or copy) all messages from the old folder to the
> new folder, delete the old folder (after verifying that moving/copying
> was successful), rename the new folder to the old folder.
> Unfortunately, references to the old folder (e.g. as target of a
> filter) will be lost.
>
>
> Regards,
> Ingo