Points of Interest

Mail Icon, Tango Project

I used KMail from its early days, and was always more than pleased with it. With the switch from KDE 3 to KDE 4.3, performance issues have been introduced so managing mailing lists became inconvenient. Since the switch to KDE 4.7, things got worse, so I decided to use another mail user agent.

Apple Mail had difficulties to read some of the mbox files for no obvious reason, as the file contents appeared to be OK.

During analysis, I noticed KMail had also created a mixture of mbox and maildir files in my archive. This means I spent a couple of hours to put things right before I got everything imported into Thunderbird. Meanwhile I think I should have abused Dovecot to migrate the messages between both clients.

Here are a couple of hints concerning the migration from a (rather huge) archive containing mixed mbox and maildir messages:

• KMail uses hidden directories to save the messages. To make them visible on Mac OS 10.7 (aka Lion), use the following Terminal command line. Replace TRUE by FALSE to undo this setting after you are done: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE && killall Finder
• Kaosmos provides a very useful Thunderbird extension which allows to import mbox files.
• Charalampos ‘DiAvOl’ Pournaris provides a PHP script which converts a maildir to the mbox format.
• In case your KMail archive only contains maildir mailboxes, Bruno Cornec’s Perl script might be useful for you.

Thanks for the code, guys!

Today I imported an ics calendar file from my Linux box into iCal. After the import, the entries weren’t editable. Fortunately the ics format is a simple, human readable text based format which can be read in a text editor. The file contained a couple of suspicious entries which read as

ORGANIZER:MAILTO:user@foo.bar

Since I do not use Apple Mail (and the mail address in the file was deprecated anyway) I assumed that iCal does not know this email address and interprets those events as organized by another person, setting them to read only as a consequence. It’s easy to fix this by completely removing those entries. In case you dislike command line applications, you may want to leave and file a feature request right now :) .

• Remove the imported, read only calendar from iCal and quit it.
• Go to the Applications folder, open the Utilities folder and launch Terminal.
• Ensure to execute the following commands by pressing enter after entering each command.
• Type cd Desktop to make your Desktop the current working directory.
• Type mkdir calconversion && cd calconversion – this will create a folder on your Desktop and make it the current working directory.
• Copy your ics file to this directory, named yourfile.ics
• Type the following command to create a second file with the ORGANIZER lines filtered out: cat yourfile.ics | grep -vi organizer > yourfile-purged.ics
• Start iCal and import the file yourfile-purged.ics. All entries now should be editable.
• Remove the folder containing the two temporary files from your Desktop.

That’s it.

I’m using and contributing code to Linux on the desktop for more than a decade now. I still prefer to use KDE as a desktop environment, and its mail user agent is one of the best I ever used.

Recently I upgraded my operating system to Ubuntu 11.10 aka Oneiric Ozelot. The migration of my PIM data went fine, except for my mail archive. I used some command line magic to port my data, and I also wiped all index related files in my mail directory. I’m still experiencing some glitches, though.

File indexing always was an issue on my system. While I like the idea, I always had to struggle with it, and I still do:

A MySQL database server now is required for kmail and akonadi, which often causes the fan of my notebook to operate at its maximum speed:

Incoming mails often cannot be moved to subfolders by the rules I use for filtering messages (e.g. from mailing lists):

I’ve also seen some empty mails where I do not know whether they contained important content. Some thread tends to crash every now and then, which I assume is related to the empty mails:

I tried to solve the issue by updating folders via the context menu from within the mail application. Since the progress is not visible for the user, I accidentally created some conflicts:

Sent mails sometimes appear twice, one copy in the outbox, one in the sent mail directory. This way I can not really judge whether mails have been sent or not.

I’m pretty sure this all is caused by my rather huge mail archive or some rather barbed settings file. But due to the sheer amount of issues, I wonder whether I should try to find the cause. In case someone could provide a hint, it would be great.

As open source software developers we often do not gain acknowledgment for out hard work. Despite the abovementioned issues, I’d like to express my gratitude to all of the developers of the great free software I’m using. Especially KMail served me very well over the years, and it always was a joy using it. Thanks girls and guys!