Importing backed-up Kmail Emails
 

Hi LQ'ers,

I've reinstalled my Slack for reasons of increasing the partition size I apportioned to it. Everything is well and dandy except the fact that I can't get back my old emails.

Prior to deleting my old partition, I've backed up my ~/Mail dir, with the reasoning that I can just put it back in place after reinstalling... However, everything failed miserably.

Methods I've tried:
1) Copying back the directory and starting up kmail.
2) Started Kmail, created my POP & SMTP settings, quitting Kmail, put back the Mail dir, and restarting it again
3) Trying to use the Import mail menu (funny how there are options for many other clients *except* KMail).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

<Edit>
Minor spelling and grammatical corrections.
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bump

he he,
Now that you killed your own 0 replies status, here I go:

I was there once, and for the life of me cannot remember exactly what I did to rectify. Try things in your kmail config menu. I think you might need to setup a new folder in kmail that points to the old messages. I can't remember right now, but will take a look later on when I go home (about 3 hours).

Cool

I give up... luckily I have most of my (important) mails still on my XP partition.

Note to other KMail users: perhaps you should backup your mails while KMail is still active. Why? Because once you close KMail, it will compact your mail files, and there's not much you can do with them after that.

Note to people who know KMail devs: KMail *SHOULD* implement an Export feature to ease the backing up process. It seems that just copying the ~/Mail directory is not enough.

:(

What format are your mailboxes in? Maildir or mbox? I do believe I have mine setup in mbox and the copy to ~/Mail directory works (just tried it). So maybe you just have to set them up (in the future) as mbox's for ease of recovery.

Cool

I have never had a problem copying the /Mail dir for kmail and putting it back.. I always put back the dir before I start kmail for the first time.. when I open kmail all my old mail and old folders are still there and everything works just fine.. I have been doing this for years.

hi!

sure, the answer is a little late but maybe usefull for someone else who tries to restore his (compacted) inbox:

1.) start & close kmail to let kmail generate the directory "Mail"
2.) delete the newly created folder "inbox" within the "Mail" directory
3.) copy the (compacted) file "inbox" to the direcotry "Mail"
4.) set read&write access using "chmod" to the file "inbox"
5.) start kmail - kmail will ask you to regenerate the index file

6.) after regenerating the index file you should see your mails within the folder "inbox"

greets, martin