Hello,

I know there has been a lot of talk on mailing lists and here on the forum about the poor state of KMail. Nevertheless, seeing that the discussions were polite and respectful, I decided to share my experience. I have been using Kmail for the last four years, with no particular problem, most of them where distribution related and were easily solved.

If asked today, I would say that Kmail/Kontact has become unusable for me for the following reasons:

I am using Kontact to synchronize my contacts, mails and calendars from a Google Account. I have 80 contacts, two calendars with not more than a hundred events and 102 MB worth of emails. I am convinced that this is, and by *far*, less than any PIM should be able to handle.

1) Memory usage (not usage blocking per se)

While to memory footprint of Kontact itself isn't huge compared to Akonadi, we are talking about 120 MB as I am writing, Akonadi's footprint on the other hand is just monstrous: about 350 MB right now.

All together Kontact and its backend Akonadi use close to half a gigabyte of memory on the worst days!

I don't know if the comparison with Thunderbird is appropriate, but this PIM is using 150 to 200 MB of memory, with mail, contacts and calendars synced. We are talking about a 1 to 2 ratio.

2) Various Kmail issues

-The "retrieving folder content, Please wait" is a thing again, I have to kill Akonadi and Kmail multiple times a day. I found threads with people affected by the same issue on the KDE forums.

-Impossible to display previously downloaded mails when no or only a slow network connection is available. The normal behaviour that I expect here is that already downloaded mails should not require an active connection to be displayed.

-Drag&Drop seems to be broken, is actually only doing copies. After a restart, copies are missing and the mails are at their original place

-new mails not arriving for hours even when asking to fetch/synchronize the folders. The solution is to kill everything Kontact/Akonadi related.

Seeing that my bug reports are left unanswered, I was wondering if Kontact/KMail needs more manpower.

Would it be possible to make it a Google Summer of Code project, even if I have to admit that I don't really know how GSoCs are organized? Would it be crazy to think about a crowdfunding to improve/solve present issues is KMail and Akonadi?

While my feedback is focusing on negative elements, I want to thank everybody that is or has been working on this wonderful software. Besides that KOrganizer and the address book work fine and it is a pleasure to use them.


Thanks,

Johan

johanc wrote:Hello,
-The "retrieving folder content, Please wait" is a thing again, I have to kill Akonadi and Kmail multiple times a day. I found threads with people affected by the same issue on the KDE forums.

This looks like an account / distribution type of problem, because I haven't seen this in quite a while. Are you up to date with the latest Applications release?

-Impossible to display previously downloaded mails when no or only a slow network connection is available. The normal behaviour that I expect here is that already downloaded mails should not require an active connection to be displayed.

This can be handled by checking the "Download all messages for offline use" in the IMAP account configuration. Of course, on the first email check will require downloading everything.

-Drag&Drop seems to be broken, is actually only doing copies. After a restart, copies are missing and the mails are at their original place

This has been fixed recently, you need to ask you distribution to provide an updated package or wait until Applications 17.04.3.

Seeing that my bug reports are left unanswered, I was wondering if Kontact/KMail needs more manpower.

It always needs that. At the moment there are just two active developers.

Would it be possible to make it a Google Summer of Code project, even if I have to admit that I don't really know how GSoCs are organized? Would it be crazy to think about a crowdfunding to improve/solve present issues is KMail and Akonadi?

GSoC requires a mentor (and so we have the same problem as before). As crowdfunding, the problem would be finding a person willing to work with a complex and admittedly unsexy codebase. That said, there has been sponsored work recently: GPG handling got a lot of improvement due to that.

Hello einer,

thank you for your precise answer and please excuse my *very* belated response.

Most of the bugs I mentionned are not present anymore, or not very often. I am excited about the 17.08 release, that should land in Arch soon.

Do you have any plans on lowering the memory footprint of Kontakt or Akonadi?