KDEPIM bug fixes in KDE 4.8.1

If you added the KDE Release calendar to your favorite organizer, you probably noticed that KDE 4.8.1 will be released in a couple days.

50 bug reports were marked as fixed in this version. Here’s the list:

Akonadi

• Bug 284224: Maildir resource does not become AgentBase::Broken when started without a valid maildir path
• Bug 289287: KMail’s views are EMPTY and upon closing KMail, it crashes
• Bug 289428: Changing message flags (in KMail2) can lose message permanently
• Bug 291810: Akonadi crashed after losing Internet connection
• Bug 291902: KMail crashed adding new IMAP account.
• Bug 291964: Crash on IMAP resource when loosing connection
• Bug 292647: DAV Resource crashing
• Bug 293178: Crash on IMAP configured as disconnected
• Bug 293589: Akonadi WebDav Groupware Plugin crash after SOGo crash
• Bug 293590: Crash when syncing newly added new IMAP account

Akregator

• Bug 292780: Kontact/Akregator crash on moving to next unread article

KAdressBook

• Bug 282169: Exported BDAY VCard field is too precise

KDEPIMLibs

• Bug 272750: Update Argentina holidays rule file
• Bug 278905: Wish: Add Indonesia’s National Holidays to Calendar
• Bug 282548: Add Singapore

KMail

• Bug 112644: In the “move” menu the current folder is displayed too
• Bug 133252: Auto expire: Mark messages read on moving to the archive folder during expire run
• Bug 154087: “New mail to mailing list” should active folder “New mail” template
• Bug 258826: Arguments with spaces to the external editor are split
• Bug 163978: Kontact name disappears from composer title bar when subjects last word is Kontact
• Bug 259093: Search dialog missing folder choice
• Bug 259358: Re-ordering folders via drag & drop not working anymore
• Bug 274678: “Distribution list” written in singular form even when talking about several distribution lists
• Bug 280026: Incorrect size of Base64 encoded attachment
• Bug 284374: KMail ‘mark as read’ shortcut bugs
• Bug 286061: Make filter log run even when dialog is not shown
• Bug 289905: Sent mail is stored in wrong folder
• Bug 291010: Folders in favourites (list mode) are shortened without need
• Bug 291171: Spam filtering breaks HTML / multipart mail headers on POP3 accounts
• Bug 291197: %OFROMNAME in template uses incorrect encoding
• Bug 291757: “Work online/offline” menu entry is ambiguous
• Bug 291849: TLS encryption was requested’ message with unencrypted plain authentication login settings
• Bug 291886: Kontact crashes on Quit
• Bug 292188: Font size of favourite folder list can not be changed
• Bug 292617: KMail crashes after regular closing
• Bug 292869: Going to new message does not restore window
• Bug 293057: KMail2 (Italian localization) fails to organize local folders in alphabetical order
• Bug 293122: Synchronizing when selecting folder does not work
• Bug 293138: Marking a Mixture of Read and Unread Messages
• Bug 293251: With Nepomuk disabled, setting an email as action item and then removing that mark removes the email
• Bug 293994: Message in Appearance/Message Tags is keeping the configuration window too wide
• Bug 294053: Setting a preference in Kontact to show/hide favorite folders in KMail has no effect
• Bug 294392: Marking Email as Assignment loses Mail
• Bug 294968: The inbox folder is not at the beginning of the folder list

Kontact

• Bug 295059: Templates for new messages in KMail not working inside kontact

KOrganizer

• Bug 280635: Not possible to list events in chronological order
• Bug 284685: KOrganizer-generated mails cannot be sent
• Bug 289623: TODO templates are saved in events and then are not found
• Bug 293571: Kontact crash while deleting an item in the local Calendar
• Bug 294145: Journal Templates are not saved 4.8.1

 

Enjoy !

 

 

Is Kmail still being developed?

This question was posted on the KDE forum a few days ago and deserves an answer.

Yes, KMail is maintained, It even has a new maintainer since a few months. Laurent Montel now takes care of KMail2 and already made an awesome work.

So, what’s the state of KMail in KDE 4.7 ?

Since the 4.7.0 tag, 556 commits were made in kdepim/kmail.
But KMail is no longer a monolithic block, so let’s add:

• 207 commits in kdepim/mailcommon,
• 51 commits in kdepim/mailfilteragent.
• 98 commits in kdepim/messagecomposer,
• 43 commits in kdepim/messagecore,
• 54 commits in kdepim/messagelist,
• 153 commits in kdepim/messageviewer,

Still not convinced ? Let’s head to the KDE Bugs Tracker…

Since the creation of the KMail2 product, 690 bugs were marked as RESOLVED.

Amongst those:

• 11 bugs were marked as UPSTREAM (bug in one of the KDEPIM/KDE dependencies)
• 4 bugs were marked as DOWNSTREAM (distribution/packaging bug)
• 6 bugs were marked as WONTFIX
• 67 bugs were marked as INVALID
• 77 bugs were marked as WORKSFORME (the reporter cannot reproduce the issue)
• 178 bugs were marked as DUPLICATE (!!)
• 324 bugs were marked as FIXED

Still according to our bugs tracker,

• 14 bugs were explicitly marked as fixed in 4.7.2
• 24 bugs were explicitly marked as fixed in 4.7.3
• 24 bugs were explicitly marked as fixed in 4.7.4
• 15 bugs were explicitly marked as fixed in 4.8

KMail bugs closed since KDE 4.7.3 (only the reports explicitly marked as fixed-in 4.7.4 are listed):

• 143059 printing of mails ignores if part of the mail is blinded out
• 258117 Cannot create Mailing List filter via context menu
• 259422 Kmail ignores trash folder setting. It moves deleted emails to the local trash folder.
• 263587 BCC addresses shows bcc’s to “To:” recipient
• 278060 Mailing list detection does not work
• 280649 Kontact crash when closing
• 282652 Setting up filters for Distribution lists does not work
• 284789 Does not remember mail transport
• 285134 Closing the drop action popup by clicking somewhere else will execute a “move” operation instead of “cancel”
• 285508 subject line is always spell checked with default dictionary
• 285623 emails are not sent until restart of mail dispatcher agent
• 285653 Thousands of errors “Select Failed, server replied A000… NO Mailbox …
• 285814 Shortcut for moving mail to folder does not move to folder highlighted in dialog
• 285878 search mail – unusable sort by date
• 286505 kmail no more send mails
• 286615 Encrypted email not decrypted in-time for printing
• 286663 Kontact crashed when canceling creation of sieve script
• 286827 Unable to reply to an encapsulated message
• 286875 Redirected email is stored in wrong sent-folder
• 286889 Move Thread to Trash Context Menu
• 286922 edited mail from outbox deleted after closing
• 287367 Kmail is truncating recipients in “reply to all”
• 287696 redirected mail isn’t marked as redirected (or forwarded)
• 287779 Copy Email then Paste As Attachment does not work as expected

How to setup your external SQL server for Akonadi

The reasons why Akonadi starts its own database instance are sometimes unclear to users.
In a perfect world, Akonadi, Amarok, Digikam… would use the same database but well… stop dreaming, the reality is different, there are valid reasons.

Currently Akonadi can start and work with both MySQL (and variants) or Postgresql.  It even supports using an external server.

You may wonder why we prefer starting a dedicated instance of your favorite server. There are two main reasons for that:

• Users should not have to be root to set up Akonadi. Using an external server means you have to create a user, grant him some privileges and create a database before starting Akonadi; In fact, users should not have to bother about what Akonadi is.
• Akonadi needs some special settings to work correctly. For obvious reasons, the Akonadi server cannot change your central MySQL settings.

 

How to configure your external server ?

The answer for MySQL is easy: use the same settings as the internal server.

For desktop users: mysql-global.conf

For mobile users: mysql-global-mobile.conf

The wait_timeout tweak is *very* important. The default value is 8 hours and once reached, you end up with this error: MySQL server has gone away QMYSQL: Unable to execute query which leads to all kind of issues (eg. 219710#3, 226400#c8)

 

Using an external Postresql server is also possible but you must have standard_conforming_strings = on in your postgres.conf. If off, Akonadi will not be able to fill its tables and you end up with issues such as bug 267807.

The Postgres doc claims «the default will change to on in a future release for improved standards compliance» since 8.2. Nothing happened yet…

 

 

 

Show your Yahoo calendars in KOrganizer ? so easy…

A few days ago, Jeremy explained how to add your Google calendars to Kontact, how about doing the same with your Yahoo calendars ?

Thanks to the DAV resource, adding external calendars became quite easy, let’s see how to do.

Start KOrganizer, in the calendars list, right-click and select ‘Add Calendar’

In the list of calendars type, select the DAV groupware resource and press ‘OK’

In the groupware server list, choose  Zimbra then ‘Next’

Now enter ‘caldav.calendar.yahoo.com‘ in the Host field and check the Use secure connection box. Do NOT add https:// before the URL

After pressing ‘Next’, press the Test connection button

and enter your Yahoo login and password

The earlier dialog will tell you if anything went wrong

You’re almost done, after pressing next, you may change the display name (that will appear in the KOrganizer calendars list) and press edit

The next dialog will show your settings for this resource. Click on fetch to make sure your Yahoo calendars are correctly listed

Voila, if you press OK to the opened dialogs now, your calendars will magically appear in KOrganizer

But… hey wait, have you noticed the carddav item in the previous dialog ? What happens if we try to add our Yahoo contacts ? Let’s see…

Press the Add button

Choose CardDAV.

In the Remote URL field, enter https://carddav.address.yahoo.com/principals/users/your_yahoo_email_address

In the Username field, enter your email

Press OK to the opened dialogs and You will see the result the next time you launch KAdressbook

Time to close some KMail bugs…

With kdepim and kdepim-runtime 4.6 release getting close, I think it’s finally time to squash the KMail 1 bug reports.

What will happen ?

In a couple of hours, I’ll close the KMail product, which means reporting new bugs will not be possible anymore. The bugs audit will then begin.

Several phases are planned :

• Revisit the KMail crash reports and close the ones that are no longer reproducible with KMail2
• If a given crash is reproducible, open a new KMail2 report with a fresh and useful backtrace and a link to the old report.
• Test the ‘Normal’ bugs, close the ones that cannot be reproduced, reassign the reproducible ones to the proper product (kmail2, kdepim, kdepimlibs…)

What to do with the wish reports has yet to be defined. I think evaluating the ones which received the most votes and discard the others is probably the best choice.

How can YOU help ?

You have KDEPIM 4.6 beta 5 installed ?  What about starting with triaging your own bugs ?

Once logged on https://bugs.kde.org, click on “My bugs” voilà, you’re ready to triage.

Want more ? visit https://bugs.kde.org/component-report.cgi?product=kmail, pick a category and check whether you’re able to reproduce the original report. Drop a comment to the report if you cannot close it.