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

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…

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

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.