Bug 44864

*** Bug 52003 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I agree with point number 1. 
Why do imap users have to have local mailboxes? 
If kmail doesn't find a local ~/Mail directory at startup it will create it and create 
some folders there even if you use kmail only for imap accounts. 

Subject: Re:  kmail imap folders local hide

On Saturday 01 February 2003 03:42, Alan wrote:
> Why do imap users have to have local mailboxes?

Because at least some of these folders are used in case the IMAP server 
is temporarily unavailable.

I have to agree with this post, the local folders are just annoying for IMAP only users. 
 
Another point is that with RH 8, the default IMAP server is UW, which uses ~/Mail as 
the local storage directory.  This is a compile option, it cannot be changed.  So all my 
mail is in ~/Mail and I access it through IMAP at various sites.  When I fire up KMail it 
assumes ownership of this directory, writes files there, etc, without prompting.  There 
does not seem to be a way to set the directory for local folders either, so merely 
starting kmail means these files will be created in a location where they are not 
wanted (I end up with a sent-mail folder even though I already have Sent folder).  
Another dangerous issue is that of file corruption, the IMAP server owns and 
manipulates these folders, and so doing so at the same time with KMail would be 
dangerous. 
 
I don't see the point above being relevant at all, the point of IMAP is to store your mail 
in one place, if it is temporarily unavailable do you want to send messages that get 
stored somewhere else which will not be available via IMAP once the server is back 
up?  This is unlikely, and even in the instance where it is desirable, a Local Folder 
account could simply be set up at this time. 
 
Another point, I can point trash at my IMAP folder Trash (but only once I have fully set 
up the account) and there do not seem to be options to do the same for Sent Items 
and drafts.  Mozilla mail handles this simply and correctly in my view, offering the 
ability to store these three folders on the IMAP server in a logical way.  I believe it is 
possible to set up the sent and drafts location on a per identity basis, but that should 
be over and above the account default setting. 
 
These problems have been around for a while, and the fact that they make kmail 
seem like more of a chore for an IMAP only user and that Mozilla mail seems more 
readily able to handle this sort of setup, keeps me using Mozilla - even though it 
certainly has issues of its own. 
 
On a fresh start of KMail (i.e. no config file, never been run) I believe no accounts 
should be created, and that means no local folders set up!  A wizard should run 
through the account set up procedure, which should probably be set up for local 
folder and POP access as default.  If should also be possible to have multiple local 
folders, if one desires, perhaps different POP accounts would go to each one!? 
 

*** Bug 59924 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 62123 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I agree with the first "point 2" (and, for the record, actually disagree with
point 1).  It would be really nice to be able to hide selected IMAP folders. 
This is useful, for example, when your server has an enormous number of shared
mailboxes which you don't care about (as mine does) and a couple which you do. 
If you could tell kmail to hide the other mail boxes, they wouldn't clutter up
your folder tree.  I don't know enough about this, but it might be possible to
do this by enabling you to "subscribe" to the mailboxes you are interested in
and then selecting the "show only subscribed folders" option, so you could call
this a request for that feature (if it isn't already implemented ;-)).

This is a really important feature! 
My clients (who I help to migrate from Win to Linux/KDE) constantly complain 
that this feature is missing.. 

I am also a person for whom the local folders constitute the real annoyance. I have IMAP account, I do not want to see any local folders, please allow me to get rid of them. At least visually - I do not want to see them. The first thing I do after starting kmail is the collapsing local folders. Troublesome.

Let me also mention that the concept of using local folders 'in emergency' is a bit risky. There are situations when I do not want kmail to silently put something into local folders (see bug #74380 where I report the situation when kmail get somehow confused about IMAP account and started storing sent items within local folder instead of the IMAP one I configured).

*** Bug 75139 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

If KMail uses temporary folders when IMAP is unavailable, those should be temporary folders in /tmp or whereever, *hidden* from the user. I don't use local folders, and forcing me to have them in the GUI because some KMail internals need some storage is not really user friendly.

In addition to Rob Kaper I would like to mention that the whole idea of an Outbox is some kind of nonsense. Why?

Because e-mail is already queued by the e-mail subsystem, in my case by Sendmail in "/var/spool/mqueue". Any extra queueing is superfluous.

The only justification I can find for an Outbox is if no mail subsystem is present on the users machine. But a Linux machine without a /usr/sbin/sendmail (non Sendmail MTAs provide it as well) is kind of seldom....

On Saturday 17 April 2004 22:35, daniel@deadlock.et.tudelft.nl wrote:
> But a Linux machine without a /usr/sbin/sendmail (non Sendmail MTAs provide
> it as well) is kind of seldom....

This is simply not correct. Why should I send my email via 
sendmail/postfix/whatever when I can deliver them directly to my provider?


Carsten

Linux machines will almost always have some kind of MTA because some programs, such as cron, need to send emails but don't support direct SMTP.  But I agree that kmail should support direct sending via SMTP.  As for the queueing / outbox problem, why not just try to send with SMTP, and if that doesn't work, warn the user and put the mail in Drafts for later manual resending.

Removal of "local folders" really needs to be added.  Having them there is confusing to users when they should be using IMAP.

On 18 Apr 2004, Carsten Burghardt wrote:

> ------- Additional Comments From burghardt kde org  2004-04-18 12:47 -------
> On Saturday 17 April 2004 22:35, daniel deadlock et tudelft nl wrote:
> > But a Linux machine without a /usr/sbin/sendmail (non Sendmail MTAs provide
> > it as well) is kind of seldom....

> This is simply not correct. Why should I send my email via
> sendmail/postfix/whatever when I can deliver them directly to my provider?

You should not. Sending e-mail directly to your provider is 100% sensible.
However, Linux systems (in most configurations) *do* already have a
queing mechanism is the sense of a sendmail binary (real sendmail or
emulated sendmail).

So, what I'm saying, if you want queuing, use the queing provided by the
operating system. The MTA is specialized up to the task and has been
configured for system wide mail delivery. I.e. if you configure your MTA
to send your e-mail once per hour, all e-mail software will obey it.

Kmail is duplicating that stuff. Which causes overhead, since it is an
extra step before the MTA queues it again. In all likelyhood it provides
less control over e-mail delivery than the MTA and has to be configured
separately by each user independend of system wide present configuration
of the MTA (which is not user-friendly, allthough I'm not saying MTAs
are user friendly).

If the Outbox is a limitation for the removal of the local folders,
it can better be abandoned...

Dani

I have two points to make:-

Firstly, on shared or corporate systems where home directories are housed over NFS and have limited space but where all e-mail storage is held separately and accessed via IMAP it is often required that users not be allowed to write e-mail messages into their home user space but instead keep everything on the central mail server. This is why the local folders should be capable of being switched off. Not only this but it should be able to be set centrally to be totally disabled by setting an option in the config files held in the KDE main hierarchy.

Secondly, on the point of the directory into which kmail stores messages. This has to be configurable, especially where the user's IMAP and local folders directories are the same as you can often get very bad interactions when accessing IMAP folders which happen to be the same ones kmail is accessing. Not only this but many other mail programs use "~/Mail" as their storage which can confuse the heck out of kmail when someone accesses the folders using elm/pine from a dial-in telnet or ssh session from the other side of the world (which regularly happens here). Oh, and add to that multiple drop e-mail folders where e-mail is pre-sorted into separate mail folders before delivery and placed into "~/Mail" and you have a recipe for disaster!

The first point is very important if you want KDE to be taken seriously in a networked, roaming access situation with a high level of control over the clients being required such as a corporate desktop environment.

On April 22, 2004 01:07 pm, steve@earth.ox.ac.uk wrote:
> Firstly, on shared or corporate systems where home directories are housed

... I agree with you on this point, I have never really understood why you 
can't add *only* an IMAP account in KMail or Mozilla, why there always needs 
to be a local folder account in the tree. Always seemed a silly restriction.

> Secondly, on the point of the directory into which kmail stores messages.
> This has to be configurable, 

Sure, why not?

> especially where the user's IMAP and local 
> folders directories are the same as you can often get very bad interactions
> when accessing IMAP folders which happen to be the same ones kmail is
> accessing.

This is where I start to not understand.. why would ~/Mail be the same 
directory as what the IMAP server is reading? Is the IMAP server running on 
the local machine? This makes no sense.

> Not only this but many other mail programs use "~/Mail" as their 
> storage which can confuse the heck out of kmail when someone accesses the
> folders using elm/pine from a dial-in telnet or ssh session from the other
> side of the world (which regularly happens here). Oh, and add to that
> multiple drop e-mail folders where e-mail is pre-sorted into separate mail
> folders before delivery and placed into "~/Mail" and you have a recipe for
> disaster!

I disagree with this too... I have used pine, elm, mutt, all to read my KMail 
mail many times without problems. I also run a procmail process that 
pre-filters my mail into folders and KMail has no issues with it.

On Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 05:00:08PM -0000, Jason Keirstead wrote:
> I disagree with this too... I have used pine, elm, mutt, all to read my KMail 
> mail many times without problems. I also run a procmail process that 
> pre-filters my mail into folders and KMail has no issues with it.

It can get messy when you combine different access methods (KMail IMAPs to
a server where mutt reads the actual Maildir), but as long as both mailers
use the same access method everything should be fine.

Rob

The main problem with kmail and other MUAs using the mbox files is that kmail has in the past got its index files really confused. I have no idea if recent changes have fixed this, however.

>> especially where the user's IMAP and local
>> folders directories are the same as you can often get very bad interactions
>> when accessing IMAP folders which happen to be the same ones kmail is
>> accessing.
>
>This is where I start to not understand.. why would ~/Mail be the same
>directory as what the IMAP server is reading? Is the IMAP server running on
>the local machine? This makes no sense.

No, the home directory is NFS mounted from a central server which is also the mail server and imap server (in this case). Hence, the imap folders are the same as those which appear under the user's Mail directory, this is so that e-mail programs such as dtmail etc. which can't use imap can access the same folders as those which do when the user is accessing thier mail from a PC or remote machine etc.

I would love to be able to hide/disable local folders as well. However, to keep the effort of changing the KMail code minimal, KMail could automatically remember on shutdown if the top-level directory "local folders" was collapsed or if it was expanded in case there are IMAP accounts available in the folder list. This way, IMAP users could collapse the local folder list once and it would remain collapsed forever (and therefore use minimal vertical space in the folder list).

This would possibly make many IMAP users happy and would alleviate the need to add any new options to the KMail configuration dialog.

I seriously hope for this feature being implemented as this bug report seems a little abandoned...

Markus, if you collapse the local folders tree it stays collapsed after a restart. Make sure your startup folder is not a local folder as this opens the local folders of course.

FWIW, subscription of IMAP folders is implemented since KMail 1.7 (IIRC). So hiding IMAP folders (as suggested in comment #7) is possible.

FWIW, the subscription mechanism is not exactly what I want:  I read my mail from two machines (home, work), and want to see a different (but overlapping) set of folders in both places.  (I read some lists only at home, others are work-related.)   So the ability to store *locally* which folders to show/hide would be nice.

(Yes, I probably should split my mail into several accounts to solve this...)

Adrian, I'm sorry but this is no option. Imap is a server protocol, so is the subscription feature. But this is unrelated from the wish to hide the local folder tree.

 - I know that the subscription mechanism is a server option - but the client could offer the possibility to hide/show folders based on local criteria.
 - I perceive this as being in the scope of the 2nd wish of the original submitter.  I haven't read all the comments, but if the discussion is only about hiding the local folder tree (I think I wish for, too...) now, this is fine and I'll shut up now.

thanks (and just so that I'm not just complaining: kmail is still the best MUA I've used so far. :-)

I have a half finished patch for folder profiles, which should take care of this wish. You can then configure sets of folders and switch between them.

A possible compromise: Allow the user to re-order the servers. I think Thunderbird still shows a local folder, but I never notice it because it is listed after the IMAP folder. 

I too use only IMAP. Local folders are of no use to me (aside from the virtual usage outlined above).

Just to say thanks for implementing the "local subscription" feature on IMAP.  (Nitpick: it'd be nice if folders that can't hold messages themselves and have no subfolders would be hidden, too...)

I guess the other part of the bug - hiding the "local" folder tree - is still open, but that's the part that doesn't bug me that much.  I'd just call it GUI ugliness.

I hate to ask howto questions in a bug... but seeing as I'm not sure if what I want is possible... if it isn't it would fall under this bug.

I'm using disconnected imap.  when I use the "move to trash" functions and send mail functions I want them to go into the imap trash and sent mail folders (that gmail provides) instead of the local ones. Is this possible now? if not then I'm hoping that it can be added in future versions.

Another vote for removing the local folders. Although its not that confusing to me it is irksome that they are there at all.And a pain when sent/deleted etc. mail goes into local folders. 

I normally use thunderbird but would much prefer a native kde client as I love kde.

Thanks for all the work

*** Bug 145937 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

*** Bug 203571 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Is this still applicable for KMail2? I am switching this bug report to the kmail2 product, it would be nice to get a confirmation if it is still valid, thanks!

yep still there, and not able to select where the local folders on the drive are located

Now it is possible to set path. ~/.local/share/local-mail/ one is used on my system.

Still would love to see a way to get rid of it completely. 

3 IMAP accounts, each has Trash folder on a server, KMail deletes to local folder.

Similar request to bug 165419.