Kmail: cannot associate identities with account/folder (always uses default)

[Chopstick]

EDIT: The problem has changed after a reinstall of kmail; read on further below...

Hi,
I just migrated from Thunderbird to kmail. Mostly it went smooth, but there are a couple of pretty annoying things I'm still fighting with.

Most of all, the inbox-folder of one of my IMAP-accounts does not show my old messages. Only the ones I recieved since I migrated, show up... the other IMAP-accounts show the whole history. Can I somehow force kmail to reload all mail? (Some more history: I set this account up in kmail earlier, then removed it and now set it up again. I have this problem since I set it up the second time...)

Another thing is that my primary inbox in local folders has a very strange name, which is, incidentally, the name of the above mentioned IMAP account... and I can not rename it.
Does anyone know how to fix that? It looks really stupid...

The last third problem is, that "reply all" does not, the email always goes to only one recipient. And inline-forwarding does not work either... I think these last things were already reported.

The missing messages in the IMAP-folder and the folder-name of my primary inbox are what really bothers me.
Btw. did "reply all" work in earlier versions? Should I downgrade?

Thanks!
Chopstick

[lmilano]

Re: IMAP folder empty in kmail

Mmm. Reply to All does work here, just fine. Right click on an email on the email list, then Reply->Reply All, it sends it to ALL recipients of the original email.

lmilano@grisell:~$ dpkg -l |grep -i kmai
ii kmail                   4:4.2.4-0ubuntu1~jaunty1~ppa2       KDE Email client

Sorry I don't use IMAP, so I am not sure how to help with the rest.

[Chopstick]

Re: IMAP folder empty in kmail

As it seems the version in the repositories is not up to date ... here is what I have:

me@erlkoenig:~$ dpkg -l |grep -i kmail
ii kmail                   4:4.2.2-0ubuntu1        KDE Email client

@ lmilano: Would you recommend to upgrade? Yours is an experimental version, is it?

Maybe an upgrade would fix the inbox-name problem as well; in some of the menus my primary inbox actually does show up as inbox, but in the folder view in the main window it does not.

As for the IMAP-problem: I set up the same account on a different computer in Thunderbird, and it's the same... so I suppose it is a problem with the IMAP-server and not with kmail.

[lmilano]

Re: IMAP folder empty in kmail

Ah, good point, yes, it is ... I would say unofficial, rather than experimental. It is the 4.2.4 official KDE release packaged (outside the official repositories) for Kubuntu:

http://www.kubuntu.org/news/kde-4.2.4

I am not sure it will solve this, but there have been a number of bugfixes in 4.2.3 and 4.2.4, so I guess it wouldn't hurt. No one reported issues with the upgrade here ...

[lmilano]

Re: IMAP folder empty in kmail

Ah, BTW: the 4.3.rc's builds, on the other hand, are still experimental and there were multiple reports of issues with those, so please stay away unless you feel like testing and reporting bugs

[Chopstick]

Re: IMAP folder empty in kmail

So I installed KDE version 4.2.4 from ppa. For a while the problem with "reply all" disappeared (i.e. it works).
Otherwise nothing changed.
Now, however, for no apparent reason, it is back again, i.e. "reply all" simply replies to the sender and no one else.
In addition another problem appeared: one of my IMAP accounts (unfortunately my primary work account...) displays "Retrieving Folder Contents" (and is otherwise black). This does not happen always, but usually after some time. When I click on on the "inbox" again, it sometimes comes back.
Moreover, no matter in which folder I am, and where I click "reply", the message invariably gets sent through my "default" account - I find this incredibly annoying! I want to reply through the account where I received the email! Does anyone know how to change this?
Btw. my default account is also the IMAP account which has the strange "Retrieving Folder Contents" problem.

[lmilano]

Re: IMAP folder empty in kmail

Mmm. There is something very weird going on. In the meantime, to reply from the proper account, you need to define, for each email address you have:

* Accounts: Receiving / Sending for the account
* Identities: one per account. And there, choose Special Transport accordingly. See the screenshot below, I use it for my gmail account (there is a corresponding receiving and sending pair).

I always thought this is incredibly convoluted, there should be just one thing to do: Identity, were you define Incoming and outgoing servers. This extra layer of abstraction I am sure can be used for some very custom situation (where your "identities" don't map one to one to your accounts), but this is very, very odd IMHO.

[lmilano]

Re: IMAP folder empty in kmail

Please let me know when you are done reading this and I'll remove the screenshot (don't wanna get spam in my email account )

[Chopstick]

Re: IMAP folder empty in kmail

I looked at the picture (you can remove it): the only difference I see is that I'm using the respective IMAP-folder instead of "local folders".

And I totally agree with you that the way accounts and identities are separated is quite confusing at first (it works differently in Thunderbird).
In fact it may have something to do with the weird behavior I see now: when I first tried to set up my accounts I did not know about that and ended up with a complete mess.
I removed all accounts and started over (doing it the way described in the previous post by lmilano).
(This also caused the initial problem with the IMAP-folder which disappeared.)

In between I also tried a reinstall of kontact/kmail - to no avail.

Usually I would also delete all config-files for kmail (i.e. my profile), but I was not able to locate them: there is no folder named .kontact or .kmail or anything like that...
Can someone tell me how to start with a clean reinstall of kontact/kmail? That appears to be the most promising direction at the moment...

[kubicle]

Re: IMAP folder empty in kmail

Usually I would also delete all config-files for kmail (i.e. my profile), but I was not able to locate them: there is no folder named .kontact or .kmail or anything like that...

Kde applications generally store their user data in ~/.kde/share/apps/ and ~/.kde/share/config/ directories...if you want to clean your kmail config and data, rename ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail, ~/.kde/share/config/kmail* and ~/.kde/share/config/email*

[Chopstick]

Re: IMAP folder empty in kmail

You would have to add "mailtransports" to the list of config-files (in the same folder as kmailrc).

Btw. the Kmail-version I have is 1.11.4.

So I reinstalled everything and configured everything from scratch. The naming-issue and the IMAP-folder problem seem to have disappeared. But "Reply all" still does not work and all accounts reply with the default identity, as before...

I looked at the kmailrc-file; every account has an entry reading

use-default-identity=false

, however, there is no mentioning of the identity to be used instead...
When I change the identity associated with a folder in the folder view (right-click > properties), I can choose from all my identities, but when I click OK and leave, it resets to my default identity, as soon as I look at a different folder.

There got to be an entry for the actual identity associated with a folder, and I suspect that the absence of this entry is the problem; maybe it is a bug in the configuration-GUI that this entry is not created? Can someone without this problem check an entry in kmailrc?

Oh, and btw., I was wondering what this Name-space-setting is... is it important at all?

[Chopstick]

Re: Kmail: cannot associate identities with account/folder (always uses default)

I just changed the title of the thread, since the problem has changed...

Also, after I reinstalled kmail, when I now send an email (or reply) I get the option which identity to use (although it is always at the default initially): that was not there before... (I did not upgrade, just reinstall!).

[lmilano]

Re: Kmail: cannot associate identities with account/folder (always uses default)

Did you try to set the Special Agent transport in the IDENTITY config window? (as in the screenshot I showed you). It seems like you are trying to click on each IMAP folder and do it there. Presumably, each folder has it's own identity (it corresponds to a given email account)

[Chopstick]

Re: Kmail: cannot associate identities with account/folder (always uses default)

I tried both... the one in the identity configuration window (the one you showed) appears entirely non-functional (it displays what I enter, but this is not what happens), the other one is in the folder properties and this is the one that keeps resetting (but at least it is consistent with what is actually happening, I just can't change it permanently - it resets as soon as I view a different folder...)

[kubicle]

Re: Kmail: cannot associate identities with account/folder (always uses default)

The last third problem is, that "reply all" does not, the email always goes to only one recipient.

I remember there was a bug with distribution lists, the message was sent only to the first recipient, so this could be the same thing. The bug was subsequently fixed, but unfortunately I can't remember which version(s) of kmail were affected.

As for the imap-folder identity issue, do you have a chance to try if it works with a pop account...that should tell if the problem is specific to imap or a general issue.