On Friday 13 December 2019 11:52:09 Gene Heskett wrote:
> Greetings all;
>
> So I picked the largest cur dirs, and using mc have moved about 2 years
> worth of each to an outside of the ~/Mail view of kmail.  And nuked
> those index files, so it has to rebuild them. Its not done with that
> yet, but we'll see.  Damn this is getting old.
>
> Cheers, Gene Heskett



The complete corpus of my Kmail (including nearly 20 years of archives like 
yourself) is only about 4.5 gb, and my machine is built out of spare parts, 
most of which are older than Utnapishtim's Flood. And while my machine is a 
little slow sometimes, I never experience anything like you keep describing. 

I hope to get myself an SSD to install as my home directory, which ought to 
speed things up for me, at least. 

It is a problem of diminishing returns: you want to have those archives 
available somewhere, to find information that you saved, but now the size of 
those archives is making Kmail unusable. So I would say, keep pruning until 
it stops misbehaving. You will still have those old emails available, so long 
as they are removed to where Kmail won't look. They can always be retrieved 
if you really need them. 

Bill