The killer feature of the Plasma Desktop has been the KDE Personal Information Manager, Kontact. I have been using it since 2004 time frame and although we have had a tenuous relationship over the years, specifically the switch to the Akonadi and the pain that came with it in the early years. I actively use Kontact on multiple machines for the feature richness of it and haven’t found anything in existence that I like better. I also exclusively use Kontact on openSUSE Tumbleweed with the Plasma Desktop Environment.
I have decided to publish my reference concerning the maintenance it requires. I could be an edge case since I have five mail accounts and multiple calendar accounts as well. Historically, I have had issues where losing network connection, regaining it, suspending and resuming my machine over a period of time would cause the thing to have fits. So, here are my fixes, whenever the need arises.
One quick caveat, your results may vary and don’t hold me responsible for your data.
Problem 1: Akonadi Gets Stuck and Stops Checking Email
This is rare as of late but 3 or 4 years ago, this was indeed a problem. I think I have used this once in the last month (Jan 2020 at the time of writing) but this is what I do.
Solution
In the terminal or even in Krunner type the following
akonadictl stop
This will stop all the processes. Sometimes they can hang and this will gracefully shut the thing down. At this point, you can start it back up in Kontact or in the terminal or krunner type:
akonadictl start
If you do this in the terminal, you can enjoy the scrolling of all the activity going on and gain some appreciation for what it is doing.
After that, you should be good to go.
Problem 2: Clearing out Cached Data
From time to time, I notice that the Akonadi cache under ~/.local/share starts to grow an awful lot. Part of it is that I don’t delete emails, but there is a percentage of that data that is vestigial and can easily be cleared out. This requires two commands and a bit of patience on your end.
Start out by running a “file system check” on the Akonadi database in the terminal.
akonadictl fsck
This takes a bit and will display all found unreferenced external files and such. Once complete, run this:
akonadictl vacuum
This process will optimize the tables and you will recover a bit of data. I admit, this doesn’t make a huge change but it will clear things out. The last time I did it, I only freed up a few megabytes of data but but it’s something.
Final Thoughts
You know those stories of people that have these crazy habits that don’t make sense, things they do that don’t really help or solve a problem like making sure the spoons are organized in just the right fashion? Yeah, well that could be what this whole post is and my obsessive-compulsive tenancies are in full expression. So, take all that into account should you choose to use any of these references.
Feedback is very much welcome on this.
Hi Nate,
I had quite a bipolar relationship with KDEPim in the past. Especially Kmail always hat great features but at the same time it drove me insane with unexpected hickups that I couldn’t resolve.
But with the switch from MySQL to Postgres as database backend I never hat any problems again. You might want to try that: https://vinzv.de/en/bringing-kmail-and-postgresql-together/
Cheers,
vinz.
That’s a great insight. I didn’t think that the database backend would make a difference.
Last command should be:
akonadictl vacuum
(not “akonadi vacuum”)
Hey, thanks! You rock! I am not sure how I messed that up but I SURE did! Thank you again.