I was setting up a business computer for a builder friend of mine the other day - latest Kubuntu LTS. Everything went smoothly until I tried to set up his email with kontact. Kmail absolutely refused to connect to the email provider and send stuff. After an hour of going through different settings it actually sent one (of twenty) mails in the outtray and from then on refused to do so ever again.

On the brink of doubting my own sanity I double checked with Thunderbird - was it me or was it me? Well, Thunderbird, albeit a beast of a programme, worked flawlessly after five minutes of setting up.

As much as I used to like the KDE PIM suite this Kmail behaviour confounded me. Unfortunately I cannot provide any more details, just needed to get this off my chest

It'd be great if Kmail started working again and Akregator supported tags for RSS feeds - boy, I'd be walking the streets telling people about Kontact! But until then it is Thunderbird, I'm afraid.

I had some trouble getting KMail sending my mail too, but I quickly found out why.
Perhaps it is the same for you. (I suspect it is)

Here's what I did:

1. Open KMail
2. Settings -> Configure KMail. New Window appears.
3. Left side: Click/Select "Accounts", then click on the tab "Sending".
4. You should have at least one account in the list.
   Select the default one, or the one used for those mails not being sent, and then click the button named "Modify" on the right side.
5. In the new popup window: Click on the "Advanced" tab.
6. In the section "SMTP Settings", select "Use custom sender address", and then write email address used in the receiving account.
7. Hit "OK", and then close all dialogue windows.

Why this works:
Some SMTP-servers require a proper sender address before they accept any outgoing mail. KMail uses systems local email as a sender address. (Example: username@localhost). It doesn't work well with external/third party SMTP servers.

Many thanks. Tried that but to no avail. As I said, I was clicking around for an hour (not without method, mind) and I remember doing that as well. Damn shame.

What's missing is the nature of the error: why did it not send? Were there any visible errors? Did you try restarting the "mail dispatcher agent"?

Sorry, as this was more in the nature of a gripe and sour grapes rather than anything else I did bother give a detailed account.

Yes, I did get a visual feedback - there were authentication failures among others.

Anyway, it is all done and dusted now and he is on Thunderbird.

Should I lock the topic? Or perhaps even better, delete it?

Of course not, because if the issue appears again, perhaps with someone else, we may locate and possibly fix the issue.

Hi, I'm experiencing the same behavior, except that I don't get any error messages at all.

The mails just sit in the outbox folder and nothing happens when I click "send queued messages".

I tried SysGhost's advice which did nothing, and I also tried this http://userbase.kde.org/KMail/FAQs_Hint ... r_messages which also did not help.

Does anyone else know what I could try?

I should mention that I'm using a completely new Kubuntu 14.04 installed from scratch on a formatted harddrive.

Edit*

I restarted the system and now I get the message:
Failed to get D-Bus interface of mailfilteragent

Edit2*

nvm, "akonadictl restart" as suggested here https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290774 did the trick