kmail2 and backup emails

[mole]

Hi all,

Just upgraded to kmail 2 and it's running after a bit of tweaking and a few reboots. Have accepted that I'll have to enable a lot of searching stuff I don't really want (I'm happy enough with locate, find and grep).

I keep periodic backups of ~/.kde4/share/apps/kmail, stored on a 1 TB USB disk, and to retrieve old emails just symlink from them to ~/.kde4/share/apps/kmail.

How can I see my old emails with kmail2 ? The installation has left the directory structure pretty much unchanged, but kmail 2 can't (or won't?) read old emails - the viewer just gives a "multiple messages...only first one shown" message then a blank email with no details. This is for single message files with full headers.

So do I have to keep an old PC running kmail 1 to view backed - up emails, or run the migration tool on the last eight years of emails - as I've over 7,000 emails in my current directories a spare PC is preferable, although in time it won't be able to read the new backups. Also what will the migration tool do to the directories - is it likley to move them to ~/.kde4/share/apps/kmail2, which would probably fail halfway through with a full local disk.

Are there any easier options I'm missing?