[Users] Suitability of using Claws instead of KMail ?

[Peter]

On Tuesday, 25 April 2017 8:20:57 PM AEST Steve Litt wrote:
> You could use the IMAP for gmail. That's what I did in order to do a
> "hello world" proof of concept of moving mail from Kmail2 to Claws. But
> sending all this stuff out the Internet might be so slow that it would
> be quicker to build your own Dovecot.

Is the Dovecot idea just to help/assist in the migration from KMail to Claws, 
or is it a better long term solution ?  I'd be a bit concerned to use this 
(old) desktop, for anything that would create a big load. It's 9 yrs old and 
needed replacing yrs ago. I'm noticing it is getting slower and slower. Yes I 
could have a box just for Dovecot, but we have power restrictions, so autumn/
winter, couldn't add any more power usage. 
 
> How private are these emails? If you don't care about Google's ability
> to mess with them and give them to others, you could just try copying
> all 62,000 messages to a gmail account you create (hopefully with full
> SSL). It will probably take hours to days.

We do have a few GMail/Google emails, but 99% of these emails are private,
 
> The minute the KDE folks strayed from mbox and maildir, I knew it was
> going to be the kind of trouble you mention, and I bailed ASAP. The
> betrayal I felt when Kmail became Kmail2 (with akonadai) was so
> complete that I vowed never to let an email client take possession of
> my messages again. So now I keep my messages on my Dovecot IMAP server,
> and use my email client just to look at them, search them, and to send
> replies. I even do my filtering with procmail rather than Claws. The
> result is if Claws had an influx of 200 programmers all wanting to
> prove their worth by making simple email into a lifetime achievement by
> throwing standards in the garbage and doing it their own way, I could
> be up and running with another IMAP aware email client tomorrow.

When I first installed Claws, I set the GMail a/c to IMAP. Was very interesting 
the way it can do that. I'd assume that a Dovecot IMAP server would go well on 
a small NAS device (low power), then it an be accessed over a lan.

Have had a brif look through akonadi db via the MySQL 'workbench'. Oh dear, 
what a mess. My background is structured programming and system analyst, db 
admin; I just 'shudder' when I see such things.  Even had a brief look at what 
is all under the akonadi paths, .... yep, .. now I'm even more keen to drop it 
and go to Claws.  lol

Peter