OS: Kubuntu 12.04 (Beta 1)
KDE: 4.8.1


Hi.

Could anyone suggest a way to enable e-mail address auto completion in kmail? For instance, I start typing in "Dai" in the To box of a new message and expect kmail to expand it to "Dai Toyama <dai.toyama@mymail.com" since the address is in my Personal Contacts, but that does not happen.

If I hit "Select" to to the right of the To box, a dialog box does pop up and show me the addresses that belong to my Personal Contacts, so I believe kmail recognizes my Personal Contacts correctly.

I went to "System Settings" --> "Personal Information" and added my Personal Contacts to "KDE Resources," as suggested in a mailing list, but that did not make any difference.

Are there any other steps I am missing?

TIA,
Dai

I believe this functional was recently restored to KDE PIM in Trunk, as it had to be initially disabled to complete the Akonadi porting of KMail. I can confirm it works fine here - locating a "Test" contact without problems on my KDE Trunk system.

bcooksley wrote:I believe this functional was recently restored to KDE PIM in Trunk, as it had to be initially disabled to complete the Akonadi porting of KMail. I can confirm it works fine here - locating a "Test" contact without problems on my KDE Trunk system.

Thanks for the info! Hopefully that means the feature will come back into the Kubuntu 4.8.1 package soon. Is that something I can expect to happen?

I am unaware if it has been ported to KDE 4.8.1 at this time - I know KDE 4.9 will contain it however.

bcooksley wrote:I am unaware if it has been ported to KDE 4.8.1 at this time - I know KDE 4.9 will contain it however.

Ah okay. Looks like I will either have to live with the lack of it on KDE 4.8 (as it's unlikely that Kubuntu 12.04 will have 4.9) or install 4.9 via backport once it's out.

To me, something like this should be ported to the current version of KDE - especially when it's still 4.8.1 (as opposed to 4.8.8 or something like that).

Thanks for the help anyway!

So in KDE 4.9 we'll be able to properly write emails again... that'll be when, next summer?

this is just great.

The problem is in knowing how invasive the change is. It may cause other bugs, or regressions. That is why released branches are frozen for new features.

einar wrote:The problem is in knowing how invasive the change is. It may cause other bugs, or regressions. That is why released branches are frozen for new features.

What's a "released branch" in this context? 4.8?

That address completion does not work sounds more like a bug than the lack of a feature in my mind, especially because it used to work. I certainly understand that a released product has features frozen, but bugs should be fixed.

A released branch is any branch of KDE which has been released in the form of official tarballs. 4.8 is one of these.

Even though this is a regression from previous versions, it requires new code to the extent it is effectively a new feature for the current KMail - hence why it may not be included as a bug fix to KDE 4.8.

bcooksley wrote:A released branch is any branch of KDE which has been released in the form of official tarballs. 4.8 is one of these.

Even though this is a regression from previous versions, it requires new code to the extent it is effectively a new feature for the current KMail - hence why it may not be included as a bug fix to KDE 4.8.

Well.. to me this is not just a small regression, it makes me stay away from 4.8 altogether. Not only "autocompletion" is non-working, it also makes all Distribution Lists (or Groups or whatever you want to call them) non-working. And that is a worse issue to me than even the missing autocompletion!!

Kontact Suite: I love you and you're my favorite PIM. I simply wish you would stop having code-freeze in so many different states of significantly broken, so it could stop hurting so much to love you. I'm hoping that with the Akonadi transition done you can hunker down and kill significant usability bugs (which have haunted your reputation for over two years) and let the majority of Kontact become mature and stable.

A release without address auto-complete is not a release along a path towards improvement, it is a release that should have originally been *planned* with a bug-release to fix, if it was deemed necessary at all.

I'm guessing this has a lot to do with the reason I no longer get "Open in Address Book" when I right-click on an email address. Each 6 months I'm left wondering if I have the mental fortitude to upgrade to the next version of Kubuntu, and face a new set of headaches with Kontact components. The bugs at least lately have been better than two years ago, but they still make me jump through unnecessary hoops to do normal things for email/PIM.

Yay for making Kontact accept .ics files (eg. from a website with konqueror) with intelligence! We'll just keep holding on to the wins, please endeavor to plan and develop in such a way as to minimize our losses. Thanks!

It's already fixed in 4.9 beta 1, for the record.

The bug report is still open
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259949

I did some extra tests: it's working but newly added contacts require a restart of kmail / kontact to be displayed (however, I only tested properly in Kontact).

Kubuntu 12.04 64-bit fully dist-upgraded; kernel 3.2.0-27-generic; KDE 4.9.00 (from ppa:kubuntu-ppa/backports repository)

Auto-completion from Contacts Address Books still does not work.