Help! Where is my mail gone?

August 10, 2006 7:14 AM

Help! Where has my mail gone?

I was running Mandriva, and I decided to change to Ubuntu (for a variety of reasons, don't ask). I have my /home partition seperate, so I can keep all my settings. After installation, I restarted KMail, and there's no sign of my old mail. I know the mail is there - I can open a terminal and see it in ~/.Mail. All the subfolders are there as well, even though they aren't seen in KMail either. How do I tell KMail that it's there? I've scoured all the options and I'm not seeing it.

posted by salmacis to computers & internet (5 comments total)

If you think you're up to it, you might start kmail from the commandline under strace, and see what mailbox it thinks it's opening... not to mention what config files...
posted by baylink at 7:28 AM on August 10, 2006

Good idea, but nope, there's nothing in the output to give me any clues.
posted by salmacis at 7:40 AM on August 10, 2006

It looks like you want to use a nonstandard Mail folder. Have you tried renaming your ~/.Mail to the more conventional ~/Mail?
posted by majick at 7:53 AM on August 10, 2006

Or, if you want to go about this backwards, Googling "kmail mail folder" turns up a suggestion about how to edit your kmailrc such that it finds folders in strange or non-default places.
posted by majick at 7:56 AM on August 10, 2006

That's got it. As I found at about the same time as majick, the default directory is now ~/.kde/apps/kmail/mail. I was able to import my mail from .Mail into a .Kmail-Import directory, and that's probably good enough for now.
posted by salmacis at 8:19 AM on August 10, 2006