Anne Wilson posted on Sun, 24 Jul 2011 17:44:25 +0100 as excerpted:
> On Sunday, July 24, 2011 03:11:45 PM Duncan wrote:
>> That leaves the gtk-based sylpheed and the claws project that started
>> as a developer testing branch of sylpheed, but grew into its own
>> project. Claws actually looks to be my best alternative at this point,
>> with lots of plugins in the Gentoo tree as well as claws itself.
>
> At one point when I was having a lot of PIM problems I was tempted by
> claws.
> Unfortunately all my efforts to migrate my korganizer calendar failed,
> and since my life and my family's lives depend on that, I had to forget
> it.
Well, it's installed, and I've ported my messages and address book. It
has been slow going, tho, because the import scripts are old and only
sort of documented. I had to "use the source, Luke", for both.
I used the kmail-mailbox importer script they had on their site. First,
I had to ensure that it was for maildir, not mbox, since kmail has done
both. It /was/ for maildir. Then I had the thing trying to string
together two parts of a path without a / in between. Come to find out
/that/ was due to my using tab-completion when feeding the initial part
of the path to the script at the command line -- because it was a dir, my
tab-completion scripts added a terminating /. Unfortunately, the script
did a perlre substitution with that string, thus removing the /, which it
didn't add back in when it reassembled the two parts of the string. Once
I figured /that/ out and removed the terminating / on the directory path
I was feeding the script, it went fine. Well, except for the fact that
the script had hard-coded the claws-default mail location of ~/Mail, and
I'd already changed that to something else. So it did the work, but I
then had to manually move the subdir it created to the customized
location.
The address book importer was worse. It's a python script. The first
problem was figuring out a way to get kaddressbook's vcard files (vcfs)
into a single combined vcf to import into claws. I found kabcclient, a
kaddressbook command-line client, could do it.
Then I switched to the claws side. The first problem there was that it
hard-coded a python2.2 shebang -- the script was from 2003. So I edited
that to simply python, which got me a bit further. Next, it was
complaining about the copyright symbol in a comment. Seems thee way
character encoding is managed had changed between 2.2 in 2003 and today.
But that was easy enough to spot since it gave me a line number to look
at and the copyright symbol stuck out like a guy with handcuffs still
dangling from one arm when there's and APB (all-points-bulletin, police)
out for a prison escapee. Simply deleting that got me farther. Then it
complained about not finding the address-book list index, asking me to
run claws-mail once before I tried the script, which I had done, and
actually deleted since the existing address books were default-stubs I
was replacing anyway. So then I had to run claws again and recreate a
stub for it to use. But apparently the address book was originally in
the main config dir but is now in a subdir by default, so I had to
manually adjust that.
Then the thing /said/ it worked, but loading claws and the address book
didn't show anything -- the script was placing the file one place while
claws was looking in a different one -- the 2003 script date strikes
again. So I resolved that. Then claws address book could see it, and it
had names, but no email-addresses! So I dove into the code and
discovered that the script had been written to deal with evolution's vcfs,
and their email key isn't (or wasn't in 2003) simply email, but
email;internet (not sure about the semicolon separator, maybe it was
colon, anyway...). Of course it took me quite some time to make sense of
the code and figure this out (well, there was a comment telling me where
the setting was, but I had to figure out how to change it without
breaking things), since I don't /really/ know either perl (the first
script) or python (this one), I just sort of muddle thru it. So I
changed the key from email;internet to simply email... and the thing
STILL wouldn't work! Now the file appeared to be correct, but the claws
address book was saying the format was wrong and not even showing the
names, now!
It turns out that last error was one last bit of file-in-the-wrong place
-- I had moved the one file to the addressbook subdir but not another,
and the wrong format error was a red herring, it actually wasn't seeing
the file at all, since it was looking in the subdir and I had the file in
the maindir!
But... that's all done.
Now I have to port the filters. I have about 50 of them, and there's no
script to convert filters from kmail style. There's a script from
something else, tho. So I can take a peak at that and see if I can hack
it for kmail filters, or I can manually transfer them one at a time...
It'll probably be the latter, since I've had enough of hacking scripts by
now, and since most of them move incoming mail to various directories
(plus adding a header so I can see what filter applied), I'd probably
have to manually convert those to the folder layout in claws, anyway.
When /that/ is done, it'll be time to setup the actual mail account
info. I've deliberately left that for last, so I don't have new mail
coming in to an incompletely setup claws, and have to reprocess it later,
after I get everything setup.
Already I can see that I'll be saving quite some space. Both kmail's
maildir and claws' mh format dirs use a file per message (but the
filenames are handled differently, and I've about 10K mails, so that bit
definitely needed a script to handle!), so that usage is very close to
the same, but akonadi's indexes more than double that, and what with all
the akonadi issues, I've various backups and old import attempts
scattered around, that I'll be able to eliminate as well, once I know the
data is safely transfered. (I could probably eliminate some of it now,
but figuring out what's actually still in use and will break if I remove
it, and what's safe to delete... put it this way, I already made that
mistake once with akonadi, and now that I'm moving off of it, it's just
easier to let it alone until I KNOW it's safe to delete!)
All totaled I'll free up several gigs on my home partition, plus the old-
kmail backup over on my media partition.
But what I'm *REALLY* looking forward to being able to do is killing
USE=sementic-desktop and very likely getting rid of huge chunks of
various kde database and semantic search junk that for me have done
little more than throw sand in the gears of what would otherwise be a
quite decently running kde desktop!
I still don't understand why, if kmail /had/ to go all akonadified,
someone couldn't have created a nice and basic kde mail client to
continue where old kmail was leaving off. (Actually, I guess I do,
apparently no developer with the kde knowledge and skills has developed
that itch that he needed to scratch... I can understand that, since it's
a lot of what FLOSS is about. But it's still hard for me to believe
that /everyone/ is happy with the situation. OTOH, perhaps those that
aren't had already switched.) Had someone developed such a "nothing
fancy, just do mail and do it well" alternative kde mail client, it's
likely they'd have stuck with the same basic maildir format, filter
format, etc, or at least have provided reasonable converters,
uncomplicated by all this database stuff. Claws claims to be fast and
efficient with the file-per-message MH format, but maildir has the same
factor, plus as it was based on the older MH format, it could learn from
some of the mistakes. I'm already appreciating that, as I had to move
mail folders around a bit after the conversion, and having just done the
same thing in kmail after the import of the old files there, I did notice
quite a difference, both in moving multiple dirs, and in marking
everything read after the import. I already appreciate the speed and
directness of working with the directories themselves, without the akonadi
database in between, bugging things up, and even when it works, never
being sure that the changes I just made had synced to akonadi, the
maildir backend, and the kmail front-end, all three. It's sort of like
the experience one gets in a manual transmission and direct-steering
sports car, as compared to an ordinary family car with automatic
transmission and power steering. It's good to be able to "feel the
road", the actual syncing of the message dirs on the filesystem, once
again, when I'm moving thousands of messages between dirs, and know that
when claws says it's done, it's done. (Claws does have a faster vs safer
setting, which I'd guess uses fsync in safer mode, the default and what
I'm using. I like that! =:^)
Anyway, enough break. Time to get to work on those filters, now. =:^\
--
Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
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