After playing with Postlerhttps://launchpad.net/postler, I've decided I really like it, 'despite' it's lack of options for configuration. It's kinda getting back to the old *nix philosophy of modular components that do one thing really well and interoperate nicely.

I'd love to see something similar in KDE - simple, elegant, lightweight. Good idea or pipe dream?

All depends if someone wishes to take responsibility and start coding. I would think that KDE is committed to Kmail so I wouldn't expect (but don't know) a new simplified KDE email client.

I'm not sure desktop based email clients are as popular or needed these days since the proliferation of full featured web based clients that have support for contacts, calendaring/scheduling, imap access and consolidation of email accounts).

Very true about web-clients, I tend to sit within gmail, simply because kmail (and most others!) is so heavy, and the imap sync for a 2Gb gmail account is going to take forever. Hence the attraction of a 'lightweight' client.

But-at the same time, I can see the benefit of (for example) extending desktop search to include emails (would be difficult unless you have a local client and local storage).

Unfortunately am no coder - or I'd look to starting something like this.

Just to close this off, I'm delighted to belatedly welcome Trojitá to KDE... a lightweight fast QT-based mail client

http://jkt.flaska.net/blog/Trojita_beco ... oject.html