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On September 3, 2005 I installed SuSE 9.3 with the help of a man who phoned me long distance several times to walk me through the installation to make sure everything would go well. It did, except for the KMail.

I’d already learned to use and like KMail - part of the KDE suite of programs that is on most Linux operating systems now - while I was working in Mandrake 9.2. I was sure I would simply copy in my backed up emails and be off and running.

Well, it didn’t work that way. Much as every other program seemed to be bigger and better and more wonderful than anything I had experienced so far, my KMail program did not work right. I’m afraid I have not recorded in my journals the details of my initial problems, but I recall that I had trouble getting my backed up emails to show up in my KMail folders. Then as I set up my accounts and tried to send out test emails I got error messages that were new and confusing to me. I could certainly go online with my Firefox web browser, and I did receive some emails when I tried to download them, but I could not for the life of me send any email out!

I took off several days from my otherwise busy work schedule to research this problem and get it solved. That involved reading the SuSE manual, and doing Google searches online, and checking out even the vaguest links to look for the right steps to take.

To get ahold of Fred, the man who walked me through the install by phone, I went online, used one of my web mail interfaces, and let him know that I had serious problems getting KMail to send email out. When he did reply a couple of days later, he really could not see how that might have happened. His installations for everyone else had always gone perfectly.

Ugh! Up a tree! What to do next?

I learned a lot of other things on the side, while I sought answers. For instance, I found that I had a browser on my computer called Opera, and it could be used for email. But it wasn’t my KMail, and couldn’t get enthused about switching to that.

From the manual I found out about the kmailrc file and got instructions from Fred to try to change permissions on it, and to make a backup copy before I changed a line or two in it. I tried that, and got no further with sending emails.

Someone from the Christian Linux Users Group (a mailing list I belonged to) suggested just giving up on KMail and switching to Thunderbird. I’d tried Thunderbird before I left Windows and was not impressed with that. I really didn’t want to go that route, However, I had other email programs in this SuSE 9.3, so I tried them out. Evolution never got off the ground. I got error messages trying to open it the first time, and every time after. But I’d tried that one out too in Mandrake, and didn’t like the way it saved messages. So I didn’t feel too badly about it not working.

I did read about and tried out Mutt and Pine. These are plain text email programs that work in the konsole, like from a command line. No graphics. That sent me off for several days reading up web pages on how to set up and run these programs.
I worked at it, and got some emails downloaded, but sending was some sort of problem too. Until I read that they use different hidden programs, like sendmail and procmail, and that these two do not like to work side by side on the same computer.

Meaning what? I have to go with one or the other? I got frustrated and discouraged.

I began to ask myself other questions for alternatives. What about uninstalling KMail and re-installing it? But then I needed to export the emails that had come down into my inbox, but which I had not answered yet. So off to hunt for that answer.

Fred sent new advice: delete the file (kmailrc) as root, with KMail closed, then remove all the files in /opt/kde3/share/apps/kmail then open KMail up again and try to create a new account. I tried that. Nope. No sending of email in my outbox.

I tried changing settings in Mail Transfer Agent in YaST (the master control area), but it did nothing, so I changed it back.

Resigned, I did a complete uninstall of KMail, and re-installed it again from YaST. I set up some email accounts all over again, and still no go.

I went back to studying up on Mutt. I really felt my learning curve had been plenty steep enough, but I was getting desperate and willing to learn Links that I went back to a number of times were;

http://jmcpherson.org/mutt.html
http://www.mutt.org/
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Mutt-GnuPG-PGP-HOWTO-4.html
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/FTP.html

I even discovered how to give a command at the Konsole command line to fetch my mail from my ISP mail servers into Mutt and Pine.
________________________________________________________________________________
the command is: fetchmail -u
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Pine, by the way seemed easier to catch on to, but didn’t come with as high kudos as Mutt when I read up on these.

About that time my niece and her 14 month old daughter came for a visit of four days. I decided to declare myself on vacation and to ignore my email problems and focus on enjoying our guests for those four days.

When they left I came back to my work schedule and decided that life had halted long enough. As much as possible I was going to get back to my regular writing, web design and other schedules, and I would go online to answer my most important emails from the web interfaces, copying and pasting email contents into my Kate editor so I could save them, and I would only work on the KMail problem when I had time. My life had to go on!

It was a number of weeks like this before I suddenly discovered the most simple answer to my KMail problem.

To be continued… in two weeks.