When I compose an email, kmail offers a list of suggested addresses which includes typos and obsolete addresses.

The kmail FAQ entry for wrong address autocompletion has no effect. The problematic addresses seems to come from akonadi, as hinted by the "contacts found in your data" header and confirmed by disabling "use recent addresses for autocompletion" in kmail settings which has no effect on those addresses popping up.

I went through the akonadi settings I know of but I found no way to configure this autocompletion feature, edit those addresses or disable it altogether.

Can someone help me with preventing these addresses from being suggested please ?

The addresses are not stored in Akonadi. That said, what version of PIM are you using? A "solution" would be to wipe the search index (how depends on the version, hence the question), which means that all recent contacts information would be deleted.

Thanks for your answer.

I'm not sure how to find the kdepim version I have, but my kmail is version 4.14.3



Is there no way to remove a few hand picked addresses or settings to tweak for this feature or disable it altogether ?
it is odd that the only approach to this is wipe all or do nothing.

Let's start safe: move away (don't delete) ~/.local/share/baloo/emailContacts and see if the situation changes.

We're on the right path: I renamed the directory and the "contacts found in your data" section of address completion does not show up.

Baloo has started reindexing my data and is building a list of "contacts found in your data" with the exact same problematic entries I had.

This data set is not sane, there are several duplicate entries for the same email address, wrong addresses with typos, addresses of people belonging to mailing-lists and a flurry of addresses I have no idea who they belong to.

I welcome any further help before I delete the folder and recreate without permissions to write in it.

These are picked from your own mails, You can get rid of it by disabling autocompletion of recent addresses.

I understand these come from my emails, I have around 10 years of emails in several imap accounts currently in my kmail which accounts for the insane data set baloo suggests.

I do want to have the completion feature as offered by kmail settings which is useful, can be configured and makes sense.
But at the same time I'd rather do without the insanity coming out of baloo index which is pretty much useless for me in this context but is also mostly getting in my way when I try to be productive and seems to lack knobs for configuration at the moment.

What is the recommended way to prevent baloo from indexing my emails without affecting the file indexing for dolphin search ?

there is no man for baloo and looking at balooctl --help-all I can only find a global disable option.

I concur. I save messages from people who have long moved ahead (e.g. college addresses) and prefer not to see their old addresses in suggestions. Does kMail really re-scan every address ever used each time a To: field is filled out? If yes, it's a gigantic waste of CPU; if no, there must be a list from which obsolete addresses can be removed.

It doesn't. You can disable it in the options: Configure KMail > Composer > uncheck "Use addresses indexed from emails for autocompletion"