[Users] Need help, moving from kmail-1.13.5 to claws-mail

[Steve Litt]

On Sat, 22 Feb 2014 22:05:35 -0500
Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> wrote:

> Greetings everybody;

Greetings Gene,

Before answering individual questions, here's the URL of the document I
wrote when I faced the same task you face now: Escape from Kmail:

http://www.troubleshooters.com/lpm/201202/201202.htm

I wrote that document after exploring lots of dead end solutions,
*including mailbox conversion via python*.

[clip]

> First question, should I try to setup the filters (there are about 50
> of them) to steer the imported mails to the proper claws-mail folder,
> and then import the kmail corpus one maildir directory (some are yet
> mailfiles too) at a time?

That's not how I would do it. I'd just copy all your directories to an
IMAP server, then copy the IMAP directories locally. And personally, I
use a local IMAP server.

> 2nd question.  Claws-mail I have been told has no dbus port.  I
> normally scan my 3 online accounts with fetchmail, using mailfilter
> for spam control as a preconnect in fetchmail, what gets past that
> gets handed off to procmail, which in turn scans for viri with clam,
> runs it by spamd, and puts what survives in /var/spool/mail/$user,
> usually me.  A session of inotifywatch being run by a looping script
> then arranges to send kmail a go get the mail commend over the dbus
> everytime a $user file is closed in /var/spool/mail.  This has been
> working extremely well for several years and linux installs, but
> claws-mail will need to be notified by some other means to go get and
> sort the mail.

Holger already gave you a way to do this in Claws, but I have to ask:
are your needs for immediacy so great that you can't just set Claws to
look for new mail every five minutes?

> 
> How would one go about doing that from this looping script since
> claws-mail doesn't have a dbus port?

You use inotifywatch, so why would you need a loop?

I'll also leave you with my philosophy on email clients...

All email clients suck. Claws-Mail sucks the least. But once upon a
time, that could have been said of Kmail, and we all know what happened
to Kmail. With that in mind, I've tried to decouple my email client
from as much as possible. Instead of having my email client contain my
past emails, I have a Dovecot IMAP server contain them, and my email
client just reads them. Instead of relying on my email client's
filters, I implement them in .procmailrc. My email client is nothing
more than a viewport into my collection of emails with reply mechanism,
and that's the way I like it.

Because of this setup, any time I want, I can use Thunderbird instead
of Claws-Mail, and it Just Works(tm). I do that often when trying to
figure whether a malfunction is due to Claws or not. And, if a future
band of Claws developers decide to do something as stupid as binding
Claws-Mail to Akonadi and Neepomuk, no big deal, I just plug in a
different (IMAP compatible) email client. Now *that's* worry-free.

SteveT

Steve Litt                *  http://www.troubleshooters.com/
Troubleshooting Training  *  Human Performance