Hi

I'm a long-term Fedora / Gnome user, part-time SuSE / Plasma user, and now a Neon convert. The best Plasma experience I've had to date and I intend to stay.

Once again I find myself trying to integrate my two GMail accounts into Kontact / Akonadi and whilst it appears to work, the Gmail experience is really flaky. Mails refuse to be moved into folders; new mails often never appear in my inbox; and a generally unpredictable experience.

I really like Kontact, especially the look-and-feel and integration into Plasma, but I still do not believe I can trust it for day-to-day use. I would rather not move back to Thunderbird but at this rate I may have little choice.

Most surprising is when I search online for guides to get GMail working in KMail most are from a year or two ago and do not cover any of the issues I am having.

So, does anyone know if there is a modern guide to integrating Gmail into Kontact, and more importantly tuning it so it works reliably? Or are the two still not a recommended combination, in which case I'll fire-up Thunderbird for another stint.

Thanks in advance,
Nick

I second this. I am also having trouble getting Gmail to send emails from KMail.

Evolution seems to work fine. When I set up Evolution/Gmail through Gnome Online Accounts, it all works great.

Kde Online Accounts does not set up email as expected. When I attempt to set up GMail in Kontact, everything is accepted however, I still cannot send emails.

Plasma is looking and working great, so I do want to stay on Plasma, but I need the kmail client to work with gmail.


Any news when this will work.. or also akondi keeps crashing when i have my gmail calendar synced.

jvapr27 wrote:I second this. I am also having trouble getting Gmail to send emails from KMail.

Evolution seems to work fine. When I set up Evolution/Gmail through Gnome Online Accounts, it all works great.

Kde Online Accounts does not set up email as expected. When I attempt to set up GMail in Kontact, everything is accepted however, I still cannot send emails.

Plasma is looking and working great, so I do want to stay on Plasma, but I need the kmail client to work with gmail.


Any news when this will work.. or also akondi keeps crashing when i have my gmail calendar synced.

Likewise I have had a great GMail experience with Evolution on Gnome but having switched to Plasma I can't bring myself to install Evolution as I'd like the most consistent experience possible. I've got Thunderbird set-up for now and it is a very decent piece of software, but I'd still like to switch to KMail if I could just get it working with GMail.

I still use Evolution on Plasma. It works great! I also use SeaHorse for my password manager instead of Kwallet.

Again, the reason is integration. SeaHorse is just the front-end app to Gnome's keychain, but it seems to be more integrated than the KWallet software is.

I can't go back to Gnome because I love the flexibility that Plasma provides and the stability. Gnome makes my laptop's fans kick in where KDE does not. So it runs cooler and longer on battery.

KMyMoney is what brought me to KDE, or to the Plasma desktop. I like both KMyMoney(not the name but the product, although I wish it did double entry accounting more similar to GnuCash style) and Plasma. KDE software is cool but it is on x11 which makes me worry that it will not keep up with Wayland.

but the real crux.. is the email.. I use gmail for most things. I need it. I need access to it by email client. I have too many emails to log in to each site. When I need to search, I use my email client so it can search all of them. Evolution is great and handles this well, KMail, just has not been able to.

I can code, but I need help to get started to try to fix the problem. And no guarantee!

Hi
This is an interesting thread and I just wanted to ask a question.

Can I "assume" from this that you folks are trying to "import" your gmail to Kmail?

It has been my experience that one does not have to "do" that.

This is on Neon Dev Stable and Neon User.

It has been my experience, and I'm not a big whoop , but it has been my experience that I "set up" the gmail account within Kmail as an IMAP account and when the proper IMAP and SMTP things are entered and all the security is checked that, it "just works" AS OF NOW.... and the last few months.

All the folders are there etc. etc. And this is with, literally, a few THOUSAND e-mails, ( know, lazy)

HOWEVER, I DID experience what was mentioned above with Evolution, literally, again, last night. It just seemed to "jump all over the place" but....

AFTER I RESORTED ascending and descending, everything "seemed" to be there.

Now, as to IMPORTING....I, personally, have not done that for several years.

I noticed, also, that there "used to be" a wizard in Akonadai for importing the calendar... in accounts / receiving / custom accounts, there used to be a Gmail wizard for "email" and also one for "calendar" now there is no wizard for Gmail, now it is just IMAP.

But....the calendar did import.

However, and this is a BIG MAYBE....it has SEEMED to 'work best" when there was already a Gmail calendar extant and not trying to "start one" from within Kmail.

Don't know that this has helped much but...hope so.

woodagaininterestingthreadsmoke

Hi woodsmoke

I'm just setting-up my GMail using IMAP, and adding calendar as an online account, so I'm not importing in this case.

Nick

Hi,

I am not importing anything either. I tried to set up my gmail accounts like normal. I am able to receive email but not send.

GNOME/Evolution does not have this problem. I wish KDE was a supported desktop to the extent that Gnome is.

I keep checking to see if KMail has fixed this issue but I think it is more of a KDE Framework issue than just KMail. I wish KMail would just work.

I like Gnome enough to go back but Plasma is great! I want to stay but I keep having to use Gnome like software that looks and functions weirdly on KDE Plasma.

For me two different Gmail accounts worked fine (well, searching is buggy!) but since two days sending on one account stopped working suddenly...

I could somehow fix it by completely resetting the account. But then the other one wouldn't work.

Also, every time I start Kmail noww I get the google authentification window and have to reconnect with Google.

I tried as some suggested to set up an app password within my Google account. It helped sending but doesn't show me any mails in the folders in kmail... just empty.

I think the biggest problem here is that there are so many layers of inconsistency going on that it is very hard to correctly identify the error:

- if you let kmail choose the recommended authentication method it comes up with another setup as the one Google suggests... so which combination of settings is correct?

- you get a "gmail" authenticate type in the setup for the imap server but you can't choose this in the smtp server setup (...is this: different names? one missing? not necessary for sending?).

- akonadi is working in the background for everything and doesn't give any comprehensive error messages to kmail - so often sending just fails silently or choosing to update a folder doesn't show a problem at all but still doesn't do any updating... how to know when exactly which problem does occur?

- documentation on setting up gmail with kmail is just completely outdated...

- the dialog window to reconnect your google account to allow the connection comes up again and again... and I suspect it interferes with the undocumented method of creating an app password in the Google account to avoid two factor authentication... btw, do I have to setup one password for kmail or two for connecting imap and smtp?

- no dev ever seems to read the forums, but the bug reporting system is just broken - where would I even post this? What software, which component e.g. - and then it will probably just pushed around between different bug trackers and marked as duplicate with old solved problems...

How should any user know how to deal with connection problems like this?

And my hopes are low, as there is, afaik, only one person developing kmail. (Huge and ambitious piece of software he created. Cudos for that. It's a great vision but I guess it's just to complex to maintain now.)

Why can Kde not use the working connection of Gnome User Accounts to integrate with akonadi?
It's working, so why have an own KDE way of doing it...?

Now I spend one day trying to fix my gmail accounts in kmail with no solution.
Yes I know it's free but also: What a waste of time!

p.