Yearly Archives: 2007

How-to import a Maildir++ folder to Kmail

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Let’s say you have a local copy of a mail folder you want to browse with Kmail. This folder is normally found on a dedicated mail server and you access it through the IMAP protocol. I was in this situation some days ago and I will tell you how I’ve done it.

Instinctively, I assumed that my folder was of the Maildir format, and Kmail local mails too. So I tried to copy my ~/Maildir folder from the mail server to my local machine (~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/mail/). And that was the result in Kmail:

kmail-no-sub-folders.png

It looks good but it’s not: there is no sub-folders !

After some googling, I found what was wrong: my ~/Maildir folder is not a Maildir, but a Maildir++ folder. This kind of folder is handle by popular IMAP MTA like qmail, Dovecot and courier-imap (which was used on the mail server where my ~/Maildir come from). There is some advantages of using the “++” flavor of Maildir over the classic one, like quotas and sub-folders. Unfortunately Kmail is not able to read the Maildir++ folder structure.

To fix this, I’ve created a tiny python script to migrate a Maildir++ folder to Kmail.

How-to use it ? Simply:

  1. Download it to your disk,
  2. Edit it and change the MAILDIR_SOURCE and KMAILDIR_DEST variables to match your local configuration,
  3. Give it execution privileges,
  4. Run it !

I advise you to try it first in a safe environment (like under a temporary user account). And don’t forget to backup everything before playing with it: because this script work for me doesn’t mean that it will work for you ! ;)

System backup script: no more endless lock

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I’ve just released a new version of my system-backup.py script.

The main update is about the lock file, which I implemented in the last version to keep the script to run twice (or more) in parallel. This is a nice feature to avoid overlapping processes that fight each other to use the same ressources. But in some extreme cases (reboot or power failure during backup, …), the lock file will remain and so will prevent the script to start (until you notice the problem and remove the lock file manually). This new version take care of this problem and is now able to remove the lock automatically if a timeout is reached. It also kill all remaining child processes.

Here is the detailed changelog:

  • Auto-kill the script if the backup process take to much time. Timeout can be defined via a constant.
  • Clean kill: track all child processes to kill them safely before removing the lock file.
  • Require newer versions of python (>= v2.4), rsync (>= v2.6.7) and rdiff-backup (>= v1.1.0).
  • Use --preserve-numerical-ids option when adding rdiff-backup increment.
  • Keep 15 increments by default instead of 20. This value can be easily changed thanks to a defined constant.
  • Remove deleted file first during mirroring and delete outdated increments before adding a new one to gain space. This strategy is safer for target disk with low remaining free space.
  • Tell rsync to print human-readable values.