Yet Another Troubled KMail2 Migration Successful (Maybe) (For Now)

To follow up on my KMail2 migration posts over the last week or so, I've 
finally found KMail2 success. Maybe. For now.

The key was a note in http://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?f=215&t=98929 
about KMail2 defaulting to assuming mbox  for the folder that the Local 
Folders resource uses. So I cleared out my ~/Mail and set Local Folder to 
~/Mail/myfolder, imported my mails again, and then reset Local Folders to 
~/Mail. I saw none of the myriad of error popups I've seen since my first 
attempt, and haven't seen any since. I moved all my mails into their 
proper places, adjusted my Identities and Filters, picked up new mails at 
first manually and then automatically, and everything seems to be hanging 
together.

I'm still having trouble with some filters that don't work. They don't 
even seem to be tested, whereas others further down in the list are. But 
that's a separate post.


However, despite my apparent success I still can't easily recommend KMail2 
to any of my colleagues, who have been using email since the 1980s. We 
work in a field where concurrent transaction consistency is fundamental to 
the correctness, accuracy and reliability of the results we produce. 
Middleware doesn't just mediate between front-side and back-side agents, 
it maintains the Reality of the whole environment. Without trust in that 
Reality, I can't trust that the operations I perform on my mails were 
Actually Performed. I've seen mails that were deleted (not trashed) 
reappear, multiple times. In bulk-marking my imported messages as read 
I've seen KMail only do some of them, at least as indicated by the numeric 
counter and the appearance of the GUI. Navigating away from, and then back 
to that folder lets me "get" the remainder of them. I've seen tons of 
synchronization issues even today in the bugs list, through Googling, and 
in my own experience. I've seen my keystrokes and mouse-clicks lost 
because Akonadi and/or KMail was busy and either my actions weren't 
queued, or they were just not received. Were it not for the system 
monitors I use (GKrellm, the System Load Viewer applet, and htop/iotop) I 
wouldn't know to go easy on the UI for big operations and just let them 
finish before moving on. Sometimes the UI tells me, with "Processing X out 
of Y messages" status messages, but quite often not.

And I have a very comfortable migration environment to work with: not a 
huge body of mails (<20,000), KMail1 on my old machine through a VNC 
session to get your help, and a big beefy box (6-core, 32G, 3TB) to 
receive all this KMail2 goodness. The experience has been reminiscent of 
my old Windows support days: rebooting to reset whatever's gone bad 
(restart akonadi), waiting for whatever's going on to complete as I watch 
the hard-drive light because the app wasn't giving any feedback, having to 
learn where to look in the underbelly of the system, and recalling some 
stray bit of info I saw in my forays to get things working that eventually 
solves the case. It's also reminiscent of my introduction to OS/2: a bad 
BIOS gave me lots of problems and got me into figuring out what was going 
on until I realized the machine was at fault but I understood OS/2 a whole 
lot better because of the troubles and eventually made some income from 
that acquired knowledge. I understand KMail2/Akonadi much better than if 
my migration had been as seamless as my last half-dozen migrations.

But speaking of Reality, the reality of KMail2 is that it's trying to do 
something real hard like concurrent transaction consistency with a 
distributed part-time volunteer workforce. Unfortunately e-mail is a 
pretty central and already-solved-reliably function in all our lives, and 
not a good place to have us all experiment on the fly with middleware and 
its need to maintain Reality for us. 


Apologies for any venting I have done - I'm going to wince and say to 
myself whatever you might have said when I read some of my old mails 
someday. Part of my frustration was that while I have the general skills 
from another domain to realize what's going on I do not have the specific 
skills to fix much. I would much much rather have gladly spent the time 
contributing to making things better than madly spending the time just 
trying to get my own world working. Thanks for the time you have spent on 
reading and replying with some effort to my messages when you didn't 
really have to.



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