Now I am trying to move away to thunderbird. Even this is a mess. Exporting mail hangs on certain folders and I have to copy around the content of this folder to get export working again …..

KDE Desktop is going down. From my point of view the two main applications that made me move to KDE a long time ago are broken now:
Kmail and Amarok …. it is such a disappointment.

the one-liner worked out of the box and the eml subdirectories had been created fast.

Anyhow, I had some strange occurences importing them, that I want to share (infos are translated into english as I use a german system)
– I needed to search the “Thunderbird ImportExportTools” with google, download it locally and then to install it via “extra->addon/ -> /Install from file (last one kind of hidden 🙂
[I did not find it with the thunderbird -search function within the “addon” feature. Maybe me :)]
– I needed to create a “new” mail account, as the export-import tool did not import to “local” (checking “local” it says, it does not exist, so, there might be some issues on my side updating from mint 17 to mint 18) – anyhow, after i created a second email-account (the “first” is an IMAP one since 2016), the importexport tool started to react properly (before, it did nothing at all while trying to import).
– I created the sub folders “inbox” and “sent” in the second account, right-clicked on “inbox” and then went for “import/Export”->import all mails from a folder->including subfolders and searched for the kmail-inbox folder “inbox” (not eml, but above) finaly imported all old Emails. (same with “sent”).

Nice explanation and thanks!

I really liked kmail, but while the whole akonadi thing is a fascinating piece of technology, I finally decided I don’t need the functionality it provides and got better use for the RAM.

They’ll be giving us a registry, next, but back to kmail: I wish I could work out how to have simple sorted by date, threaded views, without the windows-inspired “today”, “yesterday”, “last week” space wasting separators (I display the date in the list, and usually know what date it is today). I reckon some new developer though “how cool to work out when “last week” was”, and put it in. T*****s!

I have been using kmail for about ten years and finally gave up. It is now a substandard product, buggy, unresponsive, and contrary to the previous linux/unix philosophy of one good tool for one job. Now it is tied to the symantic concept through akonadi, which seems to have been born broken and broken is in its genes. Have lost mail to many times to continue to wait for a usable and dependable mail client.

I’ve been with Kmail for years as well, and it’s with great sadness that I too am finally resolving to quit. I have nothing against Thunderbird, in fact I quite like it, but I was staying with Kmail because it really could be such a great application. But it’s just so horribly buggy. I can’t take any more ‘broken resource’ error messages, any more backend changes that require my entire email history to be re-imported (to the same application!), and on and on. Time to quit.