The bug is widely reported and incarnations of it have been around since 2014 but not fixed. https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338658 Since other mail clients can continue to use gmail and akonadi can't then it seems reasonable for problem to lie with akonadi. I'm using akonadi version 4:17.04 but this is largely irrelevant - I'm not expecting a bug fix (I've given up all hope of this). I just want a better way to manage the bug.