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

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 23 February 2014 14:17:08 Steve Litt did opine:

> 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.
> 
IOW setup dovecot first.  I like that.

> > 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?

If Claws is anything like kmail, with its smorgasbord of functions, that 
means the mail composer will summarily die for about a minute once each 5, 
going away as you are typing in mid-word.  That is to me very 
disconcerting, and is the major driving force behind my doing the scripting 
that except for the fetch and sort from the local /var/spool/mail/$user, 
takes  all that "external" crap away from kmail, background duties it no 
longer has to worry about.  Those pauses now, unless somebody sends 20 megs 
of images, are a 100 millisecond job I don't notice all that much.
 
> > 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?

Because inotifywatch exits, returning the name of the $USER as the filename 
to the parent process and must be relaunched as soon as the command has 
been sent to kmail.  By the time it gets relaunched, kmail has re-zeroed 
the $USER file to a zero length file, and that delay prevents the double 
call because of the file activity.
 
> 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.

The ideal situation I am indeed shooting for.  I use my procmailrc for lots 
of stuff, but only have one non-normal mail file target setup in it. But 
now that you mention it, kmail apparently see's new mail placed in that 
~/Mail/cur mail folder in a timely manner.  I'd ask then, can I do that 
same thing with dovecot, you indicate it can work?

I've no experience with imap, to am a  total noobie.  OTOH, I am subbed 
that dovecot list also and will not trouble this list with such questions.  

Too bad there is not a mailing list for "mail systems" where such questions 
would not be "off topic".  IMNSHO, Claws/Courier, or Claws/Dovecot should 
be treated as a pair of complete solutions, each with its own combined 
mailing list.  But I am just an old fart thinking out loud, without a hand 
on the tiller. ;-)

Thanks to all who answered, I think my direction is a bit less "aimless" 
now.  OTOH, Dovecot has a pidgeonhole or sieve utility to sort incoming 
stuff to the correct folder, all of which I assume (theres that word again) 
use similar regex filtering methods, and I need a better understanding of 
that than I have accomplished so far, and which might be good training for 
my admittedly well aged wet ram.

 
> Because of this setup, any time I want, I can use Thunderbird instead
> of Claws-Mail, and it Just Works(tm).

My experience with TB is entirely as a selfcontained pop3 agent that was 
damned difficult and totally non-intuitive to configure.  But I have used 
it on my laptop when I'm squatting in a motel room when I am out someplace  
putting out engineering fires.  For that, it worked well. Several months at 
a time on a couple occasions.

> 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.

And that is exactly what I want, worry free, once its up and running.  
Because 90 days later, I will have mostly forgotten how I did it, and will 
have to start my troubleshooting from scratch.

I don't recommend getting old, its not for wimps. ;-)

> SteveT

Thanks Steve.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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