After all these years, KMail Still Sucks

[Ulick Magee]

For a couple of years I've been putting up with KMail / Akonadi's
totally broken behavour with email lists, frequently producing
"duplicate" messages which don't actually exist, don't exist in the
filesystem yet cannot be deleted. Ironically it was the opensuse mailing
list where this often happened. So I'd build up the level of
undeleteable crap to an intolerable level, then delete the whole folder
(only way to get rid of it) and re-create it and re-create my mail
filters pointing to it.

Stupid thing to have to do, but not the end of the world.

But now I have one of these phantom messages stuck in my outbox, and I
can't get rid of it. "Unable to fetch item from backend (collection-1):
Unable to retrieve item from resource: [LRCONFLICT] Resource
akonadi_maildir_resource_0 tries to modify item XXXXXX () (in collection
YYY) with dirty payload,... {other error message stuff which is hidden}

This means I can't send ANY email.

How do I get rid of this?

[Ulick Magee]

On 11/07/2021 00:29, Ulick Magee wrote:
>
> For a couple of years I've been putting up with KMail / Akonadi's
> totally broken behavour with email lists

I should point out I've been using KMail exclusively for 16 years now
and it's always been in an "it *mostly* works" mode, but now it doesn't
work at all!

[Ulick Magee]

On 11/07/2021 00:29, Ulick Magee wrote:
>

opensuse 15.2, KMail 5.14.2 (20.04.2)

[Carlos E. R.]

On 11/07/2021 01.29, Ulick Magee wrote:

...

> How do I get rid of this?

Change to Thunderbird.


--
Cheers,
Carlos E.R.

[bad sector]

On 7/10/21 7:29 PM, Ulick Magee wrote:

> How do I get rid of this?

been there, went to Sylpheed years ago, happily
ever-aftered since :-)

[grinch]

I'm with Carlos on this one, finally made the break to Thunderbird with
the 15.2.to 15.3 update.

I have been using KDE mail since KDE3 ,if Kmail was a stand-alone
program I would still use it.

[bad sector]

Other than a few lesser irritants the reason I
switched was that I want real .eml files and
optional but otherwise equal and parallel
managment in a file manager. Even Sylpheed
is still a little short on this, file-manager work
isn't always picked up and incorporated by its
managment even though 'find' is a well known
command :-)

[Tristan Miller]

Greetings.

On 11/07/2021 01.29, Ulick Magee wrote:

Short of fixing the bug yourself, there's probably no way of getting rid
of it. I had been experiencing the message duplication bug as far back
as ten years ago. For the following five or six years, I continued to
monitor the progress of the various KMail/Akonadi bug reports on the
issue and even helped test various proposed solutions and workarounds.
Nobody came up with anything that worked. I eventually gave up and
switched (to Thunderbird at work and Claws Mail at home). These
substitutes can't do everything KMail does, but at least they have no
showstopping bugs. Last I checked, back in 2019 [1], the message
duplication bug in KMail was still around.

If I had complete freedom to do whatever I wanted for several months,
I'd learn enough KDE/Qt programming to track down and fix the bug
myself. Or if I had several tens of thousands of euros to spare, I'd
hire someone to do this for me. (Heck, I even offered to chip in what
meagre funds I could scrounge up for a bug bounty, but I couldn't get
anyone else on board.)

Regards,
Tristan

[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=283682#c202

--
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Tristan Miller
Free Software developer, ferret herder, logologist
https://logological.org/
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

[Ulick Magee]

On 02/08/2021 17:40, Tristan Miller wrote:
>
> If I had complete freedom to do whatever I wanted for several months,
> I'd learn enough KDE/Qt programming to track down and fix the bug
> myself. Or if I had several tens of thousands of euros to spare, I'd
> hire someone to do this for me. (Heck, I even offered to chip in what
> meagre funds I could scrounge up for a bug bounty, but I couldn't get
> anyone else on board.)
>
> Regards,
> Tristan
>
> [1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=283682#c202
>

Thanks for the link. Very frustrating that this bug has been around for
so long. There are a couple of workarounds in there which may be worth
trying.

[Tristan Miller]

Greetings.

On 04/08/2021 02.29, Ulick Magee wrote:
>> If I had complete freedom to do whatever I wanted for several months,
>> I'd learn enough KDE/Qt programming to track down and fix the bug
>> myself.  Or if I had several tens of thousands of euros to spare, I'd
>> hire someone to do this for me.  (Heck, I even offered to chip in what
>> meagre funds I could scrounge up for a bug bounty, but I couldn't get
>> anyone else on board.)
>>

>> [1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=283682#c202
>
> Thanks for the link. Very frustrating that this bug has been around for
> so long. There are a couple of workarounds in there which may be worth
> trying.

Yeah, they seem to work for some people, but unfortunately not for me.
Hopefully you'll have better luck.

Regards,
Tristan

[Ulick Magee]

On 05/08/2021 12:08, Tristan Miller wrote:
> Greetings.
>
> On 04/08/2021 02.29, Ulick Magee wrote:
>>> If I had complete freedom to do whatever I wanted for several months,
>>> I'd learn enough KDE/Qt programming to track down and fix the bug
>>> myself.  Or if I had several tens of thousands of euros to spare, I'd
>>> hire someone to do this for me.  (Heck, I even offered to chip in what
>>> meagre funds I could scrounge up for a bug bounty, but I couldn't get
>>> anyone else on board.)
>>>
>>> [1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=283682#c202
>>
>> Thanks for the link. Very frustrating that this bug has been around for
>> so long. There are a couple of workarounds in there which may be worth
>> trying.
>
>
> Yeah, they seem to work for some people, but unfortunately not for me.
> Hopefully you'll have better luck.
>
> Regards,
> Tristan
>

Here's what eventually worked for me:

Install akonadiconsole
Close KMail
Run akonadiconsole (GUI app) from command line as normal user
In akonadiconsole go to Browser, right click on outbox (or other
troublesome folder) and select Clear Cache
Restart akonadi: Menu > Server > Restart Server (or from command line
if you prefer)
Quit akonadiconsole and reopen KMail


I've also seen akonadictl fsck mentioned, but it didn't seem to do
anything for me.

[aioe usenet]

On 11/07/2021 19:19, Carlos E. R. wrote:
> On 11/07/2021 01.29, Ulick Magee wrote:
>
> ...
>
>> How do I get rid of this?
>
> Change to Thunderbird.
>
>

I agree.