I’ve been trying KMail and…

During Akademy, I saw that a lot of people had a very modern looking Mail program, which I didn’t know, and I was surprise to hear it was KMail.

I used KMail at work (during the whole year, yes this year), on a KDE4 station, and honestly, I didn’t like the experience. At all. So I kept using Thunderbird, which I’m used to etc. However, I grew bored of the interface, there is not much innovation, and most modules are just not maintained any more.

So seeing this nice UI I told my self “eh, let’s give a try again”. So I pacman-S-ed kmail2, which was overall 3 Mo only (I use Plasma and Korganizer, so I guess I already had all the dependencies people are complaining about).

Configuration

Setting up KMail’s account (I have 4) was quite obvious, like Thunderbird and most other Mail managers.

I had a lot of issues finding out how to define my Sent and Draft folders. The Trash was where I expected (in the account management) but the 3 others in the Identity management. Why? What is different between theses 3 folders?

This leads me to another question… Why identities and accounts are separated? Are there use-cases where you have one identity for 2 accounts? I have 4 identities, and 4 corresponding email accounts. So to me it’s just more thinking to have when I want to change configuration. Is my answer model based on my identity or my account? And the SMTP parameters?

If it were me, I would put the identity section as the first tab of the Accounts settings. But that’s only me.

Else, by going through the menus, everything gets done quite fast.

Overall user experience

Out of this, I really like the fact that it’s starts very fast and that it’s very responsive. Also since I use my Nextcloud instance for all my PIM-related stuff (contacts, calendars, …), everything is integrated thanks to Akonadi. Really, don’t kill it, it’s so great to set things up once for all programs.

I also followed the advice I was given (by Cola I think) to use the 3-columns disposition. The experience is just amazingly better (you can do that with Thunderbird as well, but it looks too clustered on my tiny screen).

My only problems so far are

• Bug 362575, which prevent unsubscribing IMAP folders, so I get several useless folders like “Contacts”, “Notes”, “Journal,” etc. (it’s a Microsoft Exchange account).
• Crashes when I try to affect a new tag to an email (I get a segfault).
• And finally I expected that selecting 3 emails and click “Reply” would create an email to all recipients. I would really like to have such a feature, but hey, after 2 days, I think it’s working quite good.

I’m also quite confused about “Local subscription”, “Server-side subscription”. What is a model (reply model from the config menu, model you save, or reply with personalized model)? Still don’t know :S.
Maybe you should ping the VDG/Usability guys and see what to change in the organization and names?

TL;DR

Finally my experience with KMail is a good experience, and I think I won’t need to go back to Thunderbird. Guys, you did great job since KDE4 on this project. There is still some bugs and UX issues, but IMHO you are on the right tracks. Keep up the good work!