Serious problem with KMail

[Peter Humphrey]

Hello list,

I hope someone can help me with this. I've recently created a new user for
myself and recompiled the entire system from bare silicon on this Gentoo box
to recover from a too-full /home partition that had been unnoticed for some
time. (My ~/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log had grown to 15GB!)

Now when I come to set KMail up, nothing I can think of will make it collect
mails from my local IMAP server.

I have three sources of mail:
- POP3 directly from my ISP;
- IMAP from my local server which fetches from my ISP via POP3;
- GMail.
I can retrieve POP3 messages, but they cause the usual problems so I don't
want to use that source regularly - that's why I set up the local server in
the first place. I can retrieve GMail messages with no problem, apart from
having to go to the GMail web page to delete messages.

All outgoing mail should go via my ISP.

No matter how I set up the IMAP source, KMail seems to make no attempt to
communicate with the server. I haven't brought out the tin-snips yet to
analyse the IP traffic, but I've tried everything else I can think of. I've
tried setting up the IMAP source first, with outgoing set either to the IMAP
server or to my ISP's server. I've tried settting up the POP3 service first,
then the IMAP - this is the order in which I defined them originally. I've
tried setting up GMail first, second or third. I've even tried reverting the
server to its previous version, which used to work with no problems.

So at the moment I have a write-only e-mail system (if this makes it out).

Can anyone shed a little light into my dark corner?

[Jörg Schaible]

Hi Peter,

On Thu, 13 Sep 2018 17:56:45 +0100 Peter Humphrey wrote:

[snip]

Post by Peter Humphrey
No matter how I set up the IMAP source, KMail seems to make no attempt
to communicate with the server. I haven't brought out the tin-snips yet
to analyse the IP traffic, but I've tried everything else I can think
of. I've tried setting up the IMAP source first, with outgoing set
either to the IMAP server or to my ISP's server. I've tried settting up
the POP3 service first,
then the IMAP - this is the order in which I defined them originally.
I've tried setting up GMail first, second or third. I've even tried
reverting the server to its previous version, which used to work with no
problems.
So at the moment I have a write-only e-mail system (if this makes it out).
Can anyone shed a little light into my dark corner?

Have you tried to stop akonadi while KMail runs? I usually do this from command line "akonadictl stop". KMail
will then restart it and suddenly it fetches my mails from the IMAP server. Unfortunately after some time,
akonadi gets stuck again and a new start/stop cycle has to be done. :-/

Cheers,
Jörg

[Andreas Mair]

Hi Peter,

do you have a proxy configured in your system?
I had a similar problem here, where I had the http_proxy environment
variable set. No idea why, but akonadi used that for IMAP access, which of
course didn't work.

Best regards,
Andreas

Am Do., 13. Sep. 2018 um 18:57 Uhr schrieb Peter Humphrey <

Post by Peter Humphrey
Hello list,
I hope someone can help me with this. I've recently created a new user for
myself and recompiled the entire system from bare silicon on this Gentoo box
to recover from a too-full /home partition that had been unnoticed for some
time. (My ~/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log had grown to 15GB!)
Now when I come to set KMail up, nothing I can think of will make it collect
mails from my local IMAP server.
- POP3 directly from my ISP;
- IMAP from my local server which fetches from my ISP via POP3;
- GMail.
I can retrieve POP3 messages, but they cause the usual problems so I don't
want to use that source regularly - that's why I set up the local server in
the first place. I can retrieve GMail messages with no problem, apart from
having to go to the GMail web page to delete messages.
All outgoing mail should go via my ISP.
No matter how I set up the IMAP source, KMail seems to make no attempt to
communicate with the server. I haven't brought out the tin-snips yet to
analyse the IP traffic, but I've tried everything else I can think of. I've
tried setting up the IMAP source first, with outgoing set either to the IMAP
server or to my ISP's server. I've tried settting up the POP3 service first,
then the IMAP - this is the order in which I defined them originally. I've
tried setting up GMail first, second or third. I've even tried reverting the
server to its previous version, which used to work with no problems.
So at the moment I have a write-only e-mail system (if this makes it out).
Can anyone shed a little light into my dark corner?
--
Regards,
Peter.
Gentoo stable
sys-kernel/gentoo-sources 4.14.65
QT 5.9.6, KDE frameworks 5.46.0, KDE plasma 5.12.5
KMail 18.04.3, akonadi 18.04.3
x11-drivers/xf86-video-amdgpu 18.0.1, dev-libs/amdgpu-pro-opencl 18.20.606296

[Dominique Dumont]

No idea why, but akonadi used that for IMAP access, which of course didn't
work.

Accessing IMAP through an http proxy works, albeit often fails. I use this
setup at work where accessing external IMAP from internal network is not
possible.

I can escape corporate network through corporate http proxy, either by setting
up a systemd socket (then IMAP server must be configured to connect to a local
port).

A mote practical solution is to setup proxy in system-settings and set the
"use this proxy for all protocols" checkbox.

Unfortunately, this is not reliable and I have to restart akonadi once or
twice a day. That said, I can tell if the reliability problem comes from
akonadi or from the corporate proxy.

HTH

[Peter Humphrey]

On Thursday, 13 September 2018 17:56:45 BST Peter Humphrey wrote:

--->8

Post by Peter Humphrey
No matter how I set up the IMAP source, KMail seems to make no attempt to
communicate with the server. I haven't brought out the tin-snips yet to
analyse the IP traffic, but I've tried everything else I can think of.

--->8

Now I have a 1.2MB mail file on the local IMAP server. It contains 50-odd e-
mails which I'd like to import into KMail. I see a facility to import plain
text emails into KMail, and I've copied the file onto this machine, but KMail
complains that it can't find any messages.

What's the format required for text import? I suppose I could split the file
by hand if really necessary, but it would be a labour, full of risk.

Meanwhile, until I can get IMAP working I may have to resort to POP3
collection from my ISP, and wrestle with the problems that brings.

Does the team think there'd be much to be gained from submitting a bug report?

[Ingo Klöcker]

Post by Peter Humphrey
--->8

Post by Peter Humphrey
No matter how I set up the IMAP source, KMail seems to make no attempt to
communicate with the server. I haven't brought out the tin-snips yet to
analyse the IP traffic, but I've tried everything else I can think of.

--->8

Please answer Andreas Mair's question. Do you use a proxy resp. do you have a
proxy configured? If yes, do you need to access the IMAP server via the proxy
or is the IMAP server in the internal network?

Post by Peter Humphrey
Now I have a 1.2MB mail file on the local IMAP server. It contains 50-odd e-
mails which I'd like to import into KMail. I see a facility to import plain
text emails into KMail, and I've copied the file onto this machine, but
KMail complains that it can't find any messages.

I don't know what "plain text emails" are supposed to be, but if you have
multiple mails in a single file then that's probably an mbox file. KMail can
also import those.


Regards,
Ingo

[Peter Humphrey]

Post by Ingo Klöcker

Post by Peter Humphrey
--->8

Post by Peter Humphrey
No matter how I set up the IMAP source, KMail seems to make no attempt to
communicate with the server. I haven't brought out the tin-snips yet to
analyse the IP traffic, but I've tried everything else I can think of.

--->8

Please answer Andreas Mair's question. Do you use a proxy resp. do you have
a proxy configured? If yes, do you need to access the IMAP server via the
proxy or is the IMAP server in the internal network?

I did answer yesterday. In summary: no, no proxy.

Post by Ingo Klöcker

Post by Peter Humphrey
Now I have a 1.2MB mail file on the local IMAP server. It contains 50-odd
e- mails which I'd like to import into KMail. I see a facility to import
plain text emails into KMail, and I've copied the file onto this machine,
but KMail complains that it can't find any messages.

I don't know what "plain text emails" are supposed to be, ...

I just meant that the e-mails delivered by postfix are all concatenated into a
single text file.

Post by Ingo Klöcker
... but if you have multiple mails in a single file then that's probably an
mbox file. KMail can also import those.

Ah, I see. I'll try that then. Thanks.