Completely Giving Up on KDE4's Kmail2

I have gladly used Kmail for more than a dozen years. When KDE4 started pushing Kmail2, I lived with the growing pains of transition. But enough already. It has been years and years, and Kmail2 just gets more and more broken with each release!

The list of problems with Kmail2 would take me hours to write up.

But finally, with the latest upgrade to OpenSuse 13.2, and the inability to make my many GB of emails accessible again, and all the problems that still are not resolved with Kmail2, I have lost enough hours trying to support this horrible kludge. Filters don't work properly and bog down horribly. Searching is broken. CPU and memory and HD get thrashed, lost emails, duplicate email errors, impossibly bad export/import problems, the list goes on!

I tried going back to KDE3's Kmail (one), but it was buggy under KDE4, and I wasn't ready to go back to KDE3 itself, or the other derivations made out there. I am just sick of too much hassle, and just want to do my work, not work on my tools so much that I can't get my work done. Fortunately Linux generally makes me more productive than any other platform, but this has been a remaining area that hasn't been going well. I can't stand Gnome, Evolution doesn't do what I want, Thunderbird is okay until I try to import my many GB of emails spanning 20 years, then it utterly falls flat.

So, I am going to try a few clients, starting with Claws Mail (originally a branch of Sylpheed), and then go from there.

I will let folks know how it goes.

Key features I need working:

Properly working rules/filters to organize all my emails in folders automatically the way I want.
No lost emails.
No duplicate email problems.
Proper performance that doesn't have me waiting minutes for actions to complete.
Stability, not crashing.
Ability to handle a huge archive of emails spanning 20 years (Kmail 1 handled that just fine until I moved to Kmail2 about 4-5 years ago, Kmail2 not so much).
Ability to import my old email archives (somehow).
Ability to survive OS updates and easily restore backups of emails without having to mess with complex broken backend database email handling (completely botched by the kmail2 developers sadly).

Stay tuned!

UPDATE: October 25, 2015

While Claws Mail isn't quite as good as good ol' KDE 3.x Kmail was, it is a far cry better than the KDE 4.x Kmail2 crap! Good Riddance Kmail2, until you guys get your act back together (if ever).