kmail gets stuck "Updating item in inbox" It's accessing gmail but the account doesn't seem to be an issue. If I reboot it works for a while before getting stuck. I can provoke it to get stuck immediately by running "akonadictl fsck"
I can fix this temporarily using: akonadictl stop ; sleep 10 ; mv ~/.local/share/akonadi ~/.local/share/akonadi.moved/ ; akonadictl start This screws up kmail's default directories (apparently randomly) and requires lengthy downloads from gmail to restore my mail folders but it beats rebooting every time I want to receive email!
I think this is resolved for me but is probably still a bug but since I cannot reproduce it I'll close it. The solution appears to be to delete all the filters in kmail. I noticed that as well getting stuck there was an unfinishing filter agent action. When I investigated further this was a virus check where akonadi produce this message, "No such method dumpToString in any interface". In an attempt to get rid of this I disabled all filters onebyone, it remained the same, I deleted the filters one by one no change. I eventually deleted the filter agent using akonadiconsole and that fixed both the filter error _and_ the "updating inbox" hang. I cannot be certain that the filters were to blame or if this was fixed by some collateral effect of sorting out the filters. It remains a bug because it was not correct behaviour and not correctly represented and disabled the main function of kmail but it worksforme following this "fix"
I should add I stuck the filter agent back in and it still works...