Last week my trusty Fedora 9 file and print server failed on me. Not bad for 12 years trusty service.

I have now replaced it with a C7 server and found that lots have changed in those 12 years. Thankfully many things haven't, named-chroot, dhcpd, etc pretty much copied across and Samba wasn't a major rewrite.

However I feel like my right arm has been chopped off.  My work life revolves around my emails which were in KMail version 1.x.  My first thought was to move to the current KMail which is version 4.x.  The problem is that it's cr*p.

It appears to be the same as V1, but just more up to date - perfect. Unfortunately it is so slow that it is completely unusable, even on a brand new server. As a GUI it is unusable, and functionally fails with connections time out etc.  Some research has found that KMail was stuffed as far back as V2 when they moved to using an embedded MYSQL engine to drive it.

What I would really like is advice on how to make KMail V4 usable. As I doubt that is possible can anyone please recommend a decent email client with good keyboard short-cuts and filtering processes.

I am currently limping along using Thunderbird but I find the lack of useful keystroke functions (such as next unread message, next folder with an unread message) annoying. Having to move my hand from keyboard to mouse is more exercise than I'm used to.