is kmail2 really usable ?

[blackpaw]

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

, but ... mail send stopped working. It *was* working just fine but one day messages just started piling up in the outbox and wouldn't send - all silent, no errors, no logs no nothing to help debug the problem. I recreated the sending account from scratch, but no difference. I posted on the pim dev list, just to ask for how to activate log or debug info so I could track it down without wasting their time - not interested, no one could be bothered to reply.

Oh yes, I had exactly the same problem. Emails just won't be sent !
I found the solution in some forum (don't remember which one):
install akonadiconsole
then look for akonadi_maildispatcher_agent
and by right-clicking on it, put it online again...

Then sending mails should work again.

Thanks, that did the trick! bak to using kmail2 again and reasonably happy with that side of it. However it annoys that no-one on the dev msg list even mentioned this, I'm aware its not an end user tool, but I willing to wear the risk, especially as kmail2 was unusable as it was.

And this is a big problem, kmail2 is far to prone to silently breaking with no feedback as to the problem. Fixing it requires secret knowledge. Basically functionality is often not usable.

So I'm not the only one with search problems.

Yeah, still totally broken for me, any search, even basic subject matches returns either no data or a huge list of erroneous matches. I'd guess that disconnected imap with google could be part of the problem, I imagine that would be a lot trickier to index.

[blackpaw]

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

.....
I think the kmail devs have fallen victim to the classic "rewrite from scratch" trap and bitten off way more than they can chew. After all these years, kmail is still not usable for real work, one has to wonder if the project is close to dead.

I don't know what your definition of "real work" is, but my work is as real as anyone else and I find that KMail is definately useful.

Would it still be useful if you could no longer send emails? or search messages? because thats the very basic problems that a lot of people are having on a *very* regular basis.

You don't have to wonder if KMail is dead. All you have to check is the commit logs for the project.

Wasn't referring to the activity so much as the utility - after how years of development it still fails basics such as sending email, managing imap folders or searching messages.

Rather than rant about software in forums and blogs, and be part of the problem, how about being part of the solution by posting your putative bugs and suggestions to the KDE bug tracking system.

I and others have - might as well be dropping them down a well. Bug reports languish unviewed for years until they're obsoleted by new releases and all new bugs.


In reference to your general KDE4 comments, I love it as well and I didn't mind the extended 4.x period of fragility and heavy development. As a developer myself I use QT4 quite a bit. I'me not so keen on the focus on social integration in the desktop and I'm not seeing a lot of use for nepomuk/strigi/akonadi, personally I think the heavy integration of it into KDE introduces a dangerous dependency on new and fragile components, but I can live with it.

What I really like about KDE4 is that it has an overall vision and architecture that is reasonably coherent and coordinated, in short it has a future.

[GreyGeek]

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

.....
I'me not so keen on the focus on social integration in the desktop and I'm not seeing a lot of use for nepomuk/strigi/akonadi, ....

Agreed! I disabled those three tools shortly after they were introduced. I prefer update, grep and find for my search tools, and from the CLI they are a whole lot faster!

I and others have - might as well be dropping them down a well. Bug reports languish unviewed for years until they're obsoleted by new releases and all new bugs.

I, too, have posted bug reports. My experience has been the opposite, although I've never had a need to file a KMail bug report because it has never malfunctioned for me. . On other apps I've had the occasional bug report drop into the well and never make a splash, but more often than not it results in an exchange of posts between myself, the developer(s) and others in the thread. High quality bug reports with good back traces usually do not go unnoticed. But, as a developer, you know that a developer has only 24 hours in the day and only 365 days in their year, just like you. Nearly all are contributing their time, talents and equipment, and most have a life outside of GPL programming.... job, wife, kids, hobbies, etc... They generally triage the reports and devote their time to the most critical, or those which generated the most number of reports. And, sometimes, like you say, some bugs disappear because blocks of code are sometimes dumped in favor of a new design with a fresh batch of problems. Such is life. Linux has always come with a money back guarantee!

What I really like about KDE4 is that it has .... a future.

For sure! And on every platform. I was really pleased to see the development of KDE4 source put into the hands of the developers, who will determine its future, not Nokia or Microsoft.

[sanette]

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

.....
I'me not so keen on the focus on social integration in the desktop and I'm not seeing a lot of use for nepomuk/strigi/akonadi, ....

Agreed! I disabled those three tools shortly after they were introduced. I prefer update, grep and find for my search tools, and from the CLI they are a whole lot faster!

There is an issue here. As blackpaw said, there are dangerous dependencies. If you disable akonadi, then starting from 11.04 you cannot use kaddressbook, and starting from 11.10 you cannot use neither kmail, kaddressbook, korganizer... In short you cannot use any "PIM" component.

Some other are even more surprising. Without akonadi, you cannot use the simple "clock" plasmoid
(because it links to some events in your calendar)

I don't know about strigi/nepomuk. But in the future of KDE, you can certainly NOT disable akonadi.

[woodsmoke]

Re: is kmail2 really usable ?

As a comment on Nepomuk/strigi, I, personally, have not had an opinion about it, except that I did note that it integrates with Koffice, etc.

That was until today with the post about Bangarang in another thread.

The integration between Strigi/Nepomuk and the Kubuntu desktop that I manually installed over "Oneric" "worked" but it was even slower than molasses in the indexing of the files.

However on a stock Kubu system, in which the pair are completely integrated AND with a media player which is built around the idea of integration with Nepomuk/Strigi the whole system it is VERY fast.

It "might" be that Bangarang is the "tip of the iceberg" in terms of showcasing what Nepomuk/Strigi can do.

After all this is from the Bangarang site:

Bangarang is designed for your KDE powered desktop.

Fully integrated with KDE’s Nepomuk semantic desktop, Bangarang has access to indexed media information and automatically shares its own media information, rating, tags and usage statistics with other KDE powered applications.

just a comment.

woodsmoke