I've recently upgraded from Fedora 15 to 17 and was also faced with upgrading to KMail2. It was a huge disaster. The migration script simply did not work and ended up with a broken KMail configuration. I've seen this problem also with other people for whom I maintain the desktop.
I've played around with various ways of getting my mails in to the new KMail. I use pop3 with a simple maildir. I have all my mails in git so I can easily see when the mail program makes problems and can easily revert. In the end, on advise from boudewijn, I went beck to KMail 1 from the KDE 4.4 branch while running KDE 4.8 for all else.
The problem with KMail2 is not the semantic desktop. The problem is the use of a database to store a copy of all the emails. When you have 3G of mail, this becomes a problem. Nepomuk (in KDE 4.8) is running fine with me with no noticeable overhead.
Going forward KDE is moving to a more modular setup and invasive technologies like Akonadi and Nepomuk will hopefully remain optional.
On the 'bright' side: the reason I am sticking with KMail 1 is that Thunderbird, Clawmail, Sylpheed nor Evolution will even connect to both of my POP3 mail boxes. I might even go to using fetchmail with shell scripts in the future. Quite a sad situation, but there it is.
Posted Jun 5, 2012 16:29 UTC (Tue) by krake (subscriber, #55996)
[Link]
The default size threshold for item data to be cached in the data base is 4k. If one would like to reduce that further, the key can be found in group [%General] in akonadiserverrc
Full mails are almost never cached unless the respective backend handler is switched into such a mode, i.e. for local mail storage the server will only cache the mail envelope (basically the headers).
KDE Announces 4.9 Beta1 and Testing Initiative
Posted Jun 5, 2012 17:42 UTC (Tue) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185)
[Link]
I'm sticking with KMail because it's the only mail client that allows me to handle a thousand mails a day, quite apart of the many thousands of spam mails it also has to handle.
But some time soon I'll have to spend a day or two, three cleaning up and converting. I'm sure it'll work fine when the conversion is done, and I don't think it's the database that's the problem, at least not for me. I'm sure the database will be great, when fed a few thousand mails a day until it's 6G again.