[Kolab-devel] State of Kontact Mail

[Andreas Gungl]

Am Donnerstag, 1. Dezember 2011 schrieb Bernhard Reiter:
> On Thursday 24 November 2011 17:48:55 Andreas Gungl wrote:
> > Like many others I'm disappointed from KMail in KDE 4. All that Akonadi
> > stuff might be technically interesting, but as long as things don't work
> > as stable and fast as KMail in KDE 3, I wouldn't give it more credit
> > than Thunderbird.
> 
> If you want to check out Kontact Mail (the new design) you should do it
> for  seeing the potential or for helping to improve it.
> If you want a stable Kolab Client or just a nice Email and PIM
> application,  use a stable Kontact E35 based on the KDE 3 Plattform.
> It nicely integrated with the new Plasma Desktops based on KDE Plattform 4.
> Kontact Enterprise35 has been continously maintained and improved,
> it is mature with lots of enterprise production experience.

Hm, OpenSUSE 11.4 didn't provide KDE3 packages, so somehow I suddenly was on 
KDE4 (although I knew about potential problems with the Akonadi stack). Okay, 
at home I still run the stock RPMs for 11.4 which still provide KMail 1.13.6. 
I'm really happy with that, and I'll tell you why.

In the office I had problems with some KDE components so I decide to install 
newer packages for OpenSUSE 11.4. The actual problem was solved, but suddenly 
I was faced with KMail 2. No full text search without Nepomuk, but that one 
was slow as hell. The components used huge parts of RAM. Migration got stuck 
and was tried a few times automatically.
When I had the system eventually working, I took ages for filtering, folder 
changes, syncing with some thousand messages. The situation improved with each 
newer version I installed, but I'm still far from what I was used to before.

At the moment I use KDE 4.7.3 in the office. The KMail version is still not as 
good as KMail 1 at home, but it worked well enough. So I decided to enable 
Nepomuk. I need the search function from time to time, and I was fed up with 
missing that function.
The system got very busy and unresponsive. I decided to let it run over night, 
because I cannot afford to do my daily work with a blocked system. Next morning 
I had a working system, except when I switched to some folders in the 
mixedmaildir resource. Then I got some messages in Akonadi about timeouts in 
dbus (was discussed on the kde-pim list). I needed to restart Kontact to be 
able to continue my work. Sometimes I start Thunderbird in parallel. Most part 
of my messages are on an IMAP account, so KMail / Akonadi can go crazy while I 
still can work with e-mail - at least as long, as the load of Akonadi doesn't 
bring my system to its limits. So I got to knew Thunderbird in detail. I 
definitely don't prefer it over KMail 1, but it just works. And so it 
outperforms KMail 2. :-(

You certaily can understand my disappointment. I'm guilty, I'd better sticked 
to KMail 1 as I did at home. But I want to be fair. Akonadi and KMail 2 get 
better with each new version. Discussions on the kde-pim list show potential 
for certain optimizations which are very promising. Perhaps KDE 4.8 will solve 
most of the problem I had with KMail 2. After KDE 4.7.3 I'm more confident to 
get a happy end, even if it still may be far away.

At home I'll definitely wait with any KDE update until I know about a KMail 2 
which won't give me headaches both during migration and afterwards. I don't 
need such problems once again.

Best regards,
Andreas