Looking for input from Kontact users

[Nigel Tummers]

Hi,

I guess I am on the same boat as Paul Klos: I use kolab mainly for myself with 
a total of 11 users and 3 domains.

Kolab is up to date (2.3.4) and I use Arch Linux with kontact 4.7.3 on both my 
desktop and netbook. 
On my desktop I run a full KDE, my netbook runs awesome-wm.
Performance on both is really good and for the last ~6 months I haven't seen 
any loss nor duplication of items. 

Calendar sharing works as it should (configured from Horde) as do my shared 
spam / ham folders.

The only "problems" I have are: on my netbook when I suddenly loose 
connection, the Mail Transfer Agent will be disabled from Akonadi. Mail will 
stay in the outbox until you enable it again.

The other problem is when synching (Z-push) contacts with my n900, contact 
photo's get lost. This is a Z-push related issue and I know they are working 
on it. (Also synching shared folders)

I will suggest the same as Paul, stick to kolab and upgrade your clients. The 
latest versions are really stable.

Sincerely,
Nigel



On Thursday 08 December 2011 17:44:14 Paul Klos wrote:
> 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
> 
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