I have commented multiple times on bugs 182292 and 179006 that we already have a pretty unworkable situation with Akonadi on Fedora 12 / KDE 4.4, but this article makes me afraid of what will happen once we switch to Fedora 14. I hope there’s time for a proper fix, instead of either suggesting edits to hundreds of configuration files, or setting up more servers.

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182292
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=179006

This is a great article, many thanks. I have one question – what information does akonadi actually cache for emails? Just the mail headers? Only part of the mail headers? The whole email + attachments? I use a local maildir store for my mails, and when I tried kmail 2 this morning, it used up a huge amount of disk space. What is the estimated cache size in this case? (Maildir volume + 100Mb)? or more like (number of emails x Y kb per email + 100Mb)? It might be good to warn users about this as I was rather surprised by the amount of disk space required.

cheers
M.

POP is just as well supported as IMAP, indeed I just took IMAP as an example. So yes, you’ll be able to use Kontact/Akonadi with your setup, too. (Caching emails locally is a generic feature of Akonadi, so that’ll work as well.) As to backing up, there’s a tool which allows you to do easy and safe backups of your Akonadi data, so you’re golden there as well. As to diskspace consumption, I don’t expect any surprises there. (Note that if you use MySQL as backing store, the administrative data of the InnoDB storage mechanism in MySQL will take about 100MB on disk, independent of the amount of data you carry.)

This is a great post.

One question I have about email though is that a lot of the scenarios above are about IMAP. I use KDE on a laptop and it has all my email on it and it is all local (downloaded via POP and removed from the server).

Is Akonadi built with this scenario in mind too? (It sounds like it is, but safe to ask, I guess!) Also, I currently back up my email by simply backing up my .kde directory. Where would the Akonadi caches etc get stored and would they be quite large potentially?

Thanks!

It should probably be stored locally, rather than over yet another network connection (IMAP on server->terminal->MySql on server doesn’t sound like it’d be very good for your corporate network).

It should probably be resilient to the db being deleted from under it.

What happens if you just move it into /tmp and delete it when the user logs out? Is akonadi well-designed enough to deal with that efficiently, or would it cause the entire IMAP directory to be pulled down on each new login?

We also need these kinds of write-ups for NEPOMUK and Strigi (and maybe perhaps Phonon and Solid?). I saw some content on the community/promo wiki, but something a bit more formatted (or to use aaron’s new favorite word, “elegant”) would probably be good. Maybe something like the old plasma.kde.org or phonon.kde.org sites?