Migrating Kmail address book

[Keith Sayers]

I have now stumbled into another problem - transferring a Kmail address book. I went back to Kubuntu 12.04, exported the address book into .vcf, moved to 18.04, imported the .vcf - and got only the list of personal contacts, none of the groups. I could not even create a new group because the New Group icon was greyed out.

Scratched my head, looked at what had fallen out, went back to 12.04 and after a bit of searching found that the addresses were stored in a series of files in the home/keith/.local/share/contacts directory. The individual addresses were .vcf files and the groups .ctg files. So I copied the whole directory into the same place on 18.04, checked that it had all arrived, re-opened Kmail but found only the same result - all the personal contacts listed, none of the groups and the new group icon greyed out.

For the moment I am stumped - could anyone suggest anything for this one please?

[GreyGeek]

I have now stumbled into another problem - transferring a Kmail address book. I went back to Kubuntu 12.04, exported the address book into .vcf, moved to 18.04, imported the .vcf - and got only the list of personal contacts, none of the groups. I could not even create a new group because the New Group icon was greyed out.

Scratched my head, looked at what had fallen out, went back to 12.04 and after a bit of searching found that the addresses were stored in a series of files in the home/keith/.local/share/contacts directory. The individual addresses were .vcf files and the groups .ctg files. So I copied the whole directory into the same place on 18.04, checked that it had all arrived, re-opened Kmail but found only the same result - all the personal contacts listed, none of the groups and the new group icon greyed out.

For the moment I am stumped - could anyone suggest anything for this one please?

You might find something here:

https://userbase.kde.org/KMail/FAQs_...ame_machine.29

KMail was my goto email client for years, through several distros, right up to last September. That's when I switched ISP's and the new one used IMAP. I couldn't get KMail to connect to it, so I switched to Thunderbird, which I used to use before KMail.

[claydoh]

There is a probably a file in ~/.local/share/contacts called WARNING README that says NOT to create or copy files into this directory, as they are managed by the database, so I will venture to say that Kaddressbook/Kmail may not aee these manually added .ctg files. Try either rebooting, or (quicker) close Kontact, and then restarting the database:

akonadictl restart

The other option is to go into the 12.04 kaddressbook and right-click on the contact group, and select Export >> Vcard 4.0 , or CSV, whichever you want, and import that into your new system. I don't know how much different the old 12.04 era Kontact is, but it should be nearly identical UI wise to the new one

I booted my old laptop that still has Kontact on it, and tested copying the ctg for the contact group I created, then deleting the group from within Kaddresbook (the "Contacts" section in Kontact). After copying the file back, closing Kontact, and restarting the database, then opening Kontact, the group was restored.

Exporting/Importing the group is probably much safer, especially as you get a file format that is usable in other programs, Just In Case



I do know that the whole kontact system was an utter mess during pre-release for 12.04, and barely was put into a somewhat usable state for upgraders. I helped out on that one a bit. I think it will be a lot more stable for you in 18.04.

[Keith Sayers]

I am giving up. I can migrate the individuals list but not the groups lists. I would not mind that if I could recreate the groups by selection from the individuals list but I cannot because the New Group icon remains persistently greyed out. Tried searching everywhere I can think of for a parameter to reset but without luck. Even deleted Kmail from the 18.04 desktop and reinstalled it but still that wretched icon was greyed out. Tomorrow (now 10pm Down Under) I am going to use Package Manager to uninstall Kmail, come back in and delete anything else I can find that has Kmail in it, leave it all to settle down for a while, and then try a repeat install via Package Manager. Unless anyone here could suggest any back corner I might have missed ... (?)

[GreyGeek]

https://userbase.kde.org/Kmail/Configuring_Kmail/en

Scroll down to the section “Options without an interface...”
It will show you how & where to use the —group switch to activate groups.

[Keith Sayers]

https://userbase.kde.org/Kmail/Configuring_Kmail/en

Scroll down to the section “Options without an interface...”
It will show you how & where to use the —group switch to activate groups.

Well thank you for the lead, but all I got from it was an instruction to edit the Kmailrc file, but that has only two lines of code :

[$Version]
update_info=mailtransports.upd:initial-kmail-migration

I found I also had a kmail2rc file which was very long and which I would greatly hesitate to edit but in any case contained no mention of New Group.

I gave up, opened Package Manager and uninstalled Kmail. That worked, I checked that it had gone. Left it several hours and then this evening went back on line and reinstalled Kmail - and when I opened that the New Group icon was still greyed out. It has me beaten. Whatever is the cause is beyond my diagnostic skill. I have turned to a work around, I have copied each of the groups I use into a text file and when I need to send a group email I will do a copy/paste from that text file into the To: line in the email. That should work (does it count as a SOLVED?) but if anyone else can say how to ungrey this icon I would be much interested to know.