Looking for qualified quidance

[Snowhog]

My father is running Kubuntu 17.04 (yes, I understand that this version is EOL (End-of-Life)). He is having issues with KMail (won't send/receive anymore). He has asked me for help.

I was going to attempt to help him by first installing 17.04 in a VM, but I can't do that as the .iso isn't available now (and even if it was, I would not be able to update it to the latest state it would have been in before it went EOL).

Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS is still supported through April 2021, and 18.04.1 LTS through April 2023. What would be the 'best' solution as far as getting him back into a supported version of Kubuntu? Installing (formatting / and keeping /home) 16.04.5 LTS (downgrading) or 18.04.1 LTS (upgrading)? What are the positives and negatives of either?

Thank you.

[claydoh]

Troubleshooting kmail/kdepim on 17.04 is not going to be much different from 18.04, 16.04 is likely to be slightly more buggy/unstable. Migrating configs is going to work better upgrading than downgrading, but I doubt that 17.04 configs would have any issue working on 16.04's version. I would go for 18.04 personally.

One thing to note is that luckily, kmail/akonadi/etc do not actually touch the local mail storage itself, so even if kmail were to blow up for some reason, the actual mails are not affected.


The first thing I might try in troubleshooting, if there are no obvious error messages, is to delete the account and recreate it. If it is IMAP, give it a different name, so you have two versions, so you can perhaps compare settings between the two. This saves effort if there a lot of custom filters and the like that would need to be re-done in a fresh setup.


I am not much an expert on KDEPIM since I moved over to web based email about a year and a half ago. This was not because of Kmail at all, mainly I got rid of most of my email accounts in general, and a basic web interfaces like squirrelmail works well for me. I may move back, but I am a bit too lazy

[Snowhog]

Thank you.

When you say "The first thing I might try in troubleshooting, if there are no obvious error messages, is to delete the account and recreate it." Which account are you referring to; Kubuntu's user login account or the KMail user account?

[claydoh]

The kmal account.