KMail very slow. Why?

haukew · Posted: Wed Mar 28, 2007 2:29 pm Post subject: KMail very slow. Why?

Hi!
Since i am using KDE i want to use KMail (because of the better Adressbook-Integration in KMobiletools, Kopete etc). I have been using it now for about three weeks, and i have realized that

- KMail ist very, very slow when i filter spam - it takes about 1-2 Seconds per E-Mail to be filtered, during this time (about 1 minute) i can't do anything with KMail. It just hangs. Thunderbird needed about 1-2 seconds for all my spam.
- The spamfilter i use (SpamAssassin) is not as good as the one in Thunderbird, which filtered almost every Spam-Mail out - SpamAssassin, after 2 weeks of training, filters 2-5 out of 20
- KMail is in general much slower than Thunderbird, opening dialogs like "send mail" takes about 1 second.

My computer is a 3500+ with 1 Gig RAM, so it can't be that.
How can i fix this? And which other Spamfilter is better and faster than SpamAssassin?

Many thanks in advance, hauke
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nahpets · Posted: Thu Mar 29, 2007 6:34 am Post subject:

KMail isn't slow when you filter spam; SpamAssassin is slow. KMail is basically waiting for SA to finish processing each mail. What you should do is find a way to speed up SA. Are you using spamc/spamd instead of using "spamassassin"?

When I used SA, it caught about 99% of the spam I was getting, but as you noticed, it's slow. I switched to Bogofilter and have been happy with it. What you can try is to use Bogofilter first, and then SA for anything that slips through. You should also setup a whitelist so that all mails coming from known senders will skip the spam filtering. So something like this should help speed things up:

check sender against whitelist
if not in whitelist, run mail through Bogofilter
if bogosity < threshold, run mail through SpamAssassin

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haukew · Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 2:57 pm Post subject:

uhm, i emerged spamassassin and selected it in KMail, it is called "Spamassassin 3.x (Perl)" there. I also have "GMX Spam" but i deactivated (didn't select) it.
I will give bogofilter a try :-)

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devsk · Posted: Fri Mar 30, 2007 5:12 pm Post subject:

of all the KDE programs I have used, kmail is probably the worst. I don't know how can anyone use it on daily basis. I don't have any filters or virus scans enabled, and going from one folder to another can take minutes sometimes (with the blue screen showing, "please wait"), when the same operation completes in under a second in thunderbird. I wanted better integration with the rest of kde too, but gave up on kmail after sometime. It was an utter waste of time.

PS: I did file a few bugs and nobody responded, and I decided to just chuck it.

nahpets · Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 2:09 am Post subject:

devsk · Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 3:27 pm Post subject:

Carlo · Developer Joined: 12 Aug 2002 Posts: 3356

hukew: Calling the perl script for every single email, instead using spamd/spamc, is of course incredible slow.

devsk: I run KMail just fine with about 160.000 emails atm. using pop3 accounts. Are that imap accounts you've had the problems with?
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devsk · Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 6:34 pm Post subject:

Carlo · Developer Joined: 12 Aug 2002 Posts: 3356

Well, KMail's imap code can only get better...
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loki_val · Posted: Sat Mar 31, 2007 9:42 pm Post subject:

If it's imap you're having trouble with, you will like 3.5.7 - lots of fixes have been introduced. See bug171346 for some patches I have backported for 3.5.6. I can now actually read LKML without Kmail crashing. In fact, since applying these and a few other tweaks, Kmail has been working without crashes and rather fast.

devsk · Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 12:10 am Post subject:

nahpets · Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 5:29 am Post subject:

loki_val · Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 8:00 pm Post subject:

devsk · Posted: Sun Apr 01, 2007 8:07 pm Post subject:

nahpets · Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 2:25 am Post subject:

devsk · Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 2:48 am Post subject:

astor84 · Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 3:11 am Post subject:

nahpets · Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2007 3:23 am Post subject:

haukew · Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2007 1:35 pm Post subject:

I just love this forum! Together with the awesome handbook it makes gentoo the very best distro, even for noobs like me.
Thank you all for your help, i selected "Spam Assassin (Daemon) now as my spam-filter.

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mimosinnet · Posted: Thu Aug 23, 2007 5:43 pm Post subject:

z_sfeng · Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 1:13 pm Post subject:

Kmail IS SLOW here with IMAP. very often just listing folder forever, and I have to restart kmail.
So I switched to thunderbird.
maybe I should try the disconnected imap. But forgive me, I couldn't figure out how to configure the "disconnceted IMAP". I see nothing related in "setting" or in folder property.

z_sfeng · Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 1:29 pm Post subject:

Sorry. After a simple search. I found the howto... somebody already asked same silly quesiton :oops:

jstead1 · Posted: Thu Nov 08, 2007 11:54 pm Post subject:

I have always found spamassassin to be very powerful (it is incredibly customizable, and there are tons of rule sets out there).
I have also found it to be fairly slow. It seems much better suited to use on a mail server, where it is getting all the mail, processing it, and then storing it. That way, you are not waiting for spamassassin when you open your client, because it is working 24/7, and it is not bogging down your machine, because it is running on a very powerful mail server.

But that's not what you have, and that's not what I have, so I used bogofilter when I used kmail.

If you are using a pop server, kmail has the ability to screen mail based on headers, saving the download. You can also screen out lots of mail, simply based on rules before the mail gets to the rule implementing the spam filter.

As an example, you can have a pop filter to screen out anything with viagra in the subject (I know, they don't do that anymore) and delete it directly on the server. I used a regular expression to screen out any mail with more than 3 @myparticulardomain.rr.com in any address field because a lot of spammers would send mail to 5 or 6 names in the domain, and I only knew 3. With the custom rulesets to reduce the load on bogofilter, kmail actually was a good bit faster than thunderbird for me, but my main e-mail account was on a pop server.

I use thunderbird now, because it can integrate with google calendar and gmail very well. But kmail has some very unique features, I hate to see people dissing it so bad.
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mimosinnet · Posted: Sun Nov 11, 2007 9:25 pm Post subject:

Toomuch · n00b Joined: 16 Mar 2004 Posts: 49

Bogofilter has worked perfectly for me. Must have been months since one single spam has slipped through.
With IMAP KMail is still (3.5.7) frustrating as it likes to copy newest mails back and forth several times. If someone sends a large attachment this can take very long time.

t