Looking for input from Kontact users

[Paul Klos]

Hi,

We're probably not too representative, running Kolab for only our family, but 
happy to oblige anyway.

All our kontact versions are 4.7.3. at the moment.

Platforms: Gentoo, Kubuntu and Windows. Total users: 5. The Windows users only 
use email, not the other Kolab functionality.

We also have two mobile clients, one nokia N900 and an android phone. On my 
N900 I use z-push for contacts/calendar and several mail clients: mostly the 
native client or claws mail, sometimes Kontact touch if I really need to use 
some Kolab specific function, e.g. accept an invitation.

At home, we have local home directories, although we do have a single mounted 
Documents folder for easy file transfer and central storage.

As of kontact 4.7.2 I'm quite pleased. Kontact hardly ever crashes on any 
platform, and basically everything works. I can honestly say we never lost any 
mail because of Kontact.

We started with Kolab 2.2.1, I believe, because I was curious to try out the 
shared addressbooks and calendars.

In earlier versions, more or less up to 4.6.x akonadi has been horrible, 
causing bad performance, crashes, calendars being unavailable/unwritable and a 
host of other issues. Our main requirement is email, and that has always 
worked, but it's been pretty bad in the past.

At the moment, we have only some issues with this bug: 
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259949, which has to do with address 
autocompletion in kmail composer. Fortunately, this sort of works for us, so 
the bug doesn't hit us as hard as some other users (don't ask why...).

We don't use DIMAP at all anymore , but we have used the DIMAP/IMAP combo in 
the past, as that has long been the default setup. As far as I remember, it 
always worked, at least sort of, but I have deleted the whole local storage on 
a few occasions.

I think by now I would actually recommend moving to the latest KDE version 
including Akonadi for PIM data. I make no guarantees, but I think you should 
most definitely have a look into that. For sure, your DIMAP issues with the 
mounted drive will be gone, as Akonadi will take care of everything (mail + 
groupware).

Good luck! Don't hesitate to ask for more info.

Paul 

Op donderdag 8 december 2011 15:58:37 schreef ITSEF Admin:
> Hi all,
> 
> This plea for input goes to all folks out there who are using the Kontact
> client in conjunction with Kolab - I am very curious as to your experiences
> and environments, as our own experience with Kontact is extremely bad.
> Hence, I'm looking for anything that could possibly help to alleviate the
> situation - short of migrating to another mail/groupware solution... The
> things I'm interested in:
> 
> - What version of Kontact are you using (e35, "the one that came with the
> distribution", ...)?
> - On which platform and with how many users?
> - How are your home directories organised (NFS mounted, local, .....)?
> - Do you use DIMAP only or the split IMAP/DIMAP set-up?
> - What are your experiences with Kontact with regard to
>   * stability (crashes...)
>   * reliability (lost mail, lost appointments, ....)
>   * overall "good behaviour"
> 
> 
> A bit of background from my side: We are using Kontact e35 from Kolab,
> repackaged for use under Kubuntu 10.04LTS - which means a KDE 3.5.x Kontact
> running under KDE4. All our home directories are mounted on the workstations
> via NFS4 and we only have a few dozen users. As the performance of DIMAP on
> NFS mounted home directories has proven to be desastrous in the past, we
> are using IMAP for mail and DIMAP for groupware only.
> Overall, Kontact has proven to be very crashprone for many (though not all)
> of our users and also has the tendency to show erratic behaviour (mails
> that seem to be empty, mails that were once deleted and show up again,
> slow-downs, you name it). Most of these affect a large number of our users
> (though, again, not all) and most of the time they are fixed by throwing
> away the IMAP index files. Any attempts in figuring out patterns for
> reproducing the problems to provide the developers with useful input have
> failed so far, as have attempts to figure out why some users are affected
> and others are not. For those that *are* affected, throwing away index
> files has almost become a habit, but it only helps for a while. Same goes
> for ditching the complete KDE configuration - it helps, but not for too
> long.
> Things in fact have gotten so bad that we are considering a migration... :-(
> Does any of this sound familiar to anyone out there - or are we just the
> unlucky ones? :-}
> 
> Thank you in advance for any input!
> 
> Reagards,
> 
> Thomas