As I understand it--which is a big disclaimer--personal information used in Kontact and Kmail, and perhaps other apps, is stored in an external database, Akonadi. If that is correct, who controls Akonadi? What assurances are there that the information is appropriately encrypted and secured?

You control it, as it is a database running on your system. It is external as in it is not an embedded part of a program.

@claydoh Thank you. I was sort of hoping for a response like that. Can you point to any documentation about that? I have found nothing that indicates it runs on the local machine. It seemed otherwise when, for example, trying to configure Kmail to play nice with Exchange Online pops a permission request for ews.akonadi.com , if i recall it correctly.

I think you may have that wrong, it may be something like com.akonidi-ews or something like that, not an external url. The Exchange server is calling for the popup to authorize access to that exchange server. The akonadi-ews is the component that communicates with this particular service. There are similar components that connect to gmail, IMAP , POP3, etc.

https://community.kde.org/KDE_PIM/Akonadi
https://userbase.kde.org/Akonadi
https://api.kde.org/kdepim/akonadi/html/index.html


Now, I have probably flubbed the description, as KDEPIM can be run on networks with the database on another machine, such as in a business or corporate setting, but in a desktop install, it is all locally run.

The precise dependencies will vary depending on the distro., but do include a database server. In my case:

Code: Select all

$ sudo apt install akonadi-server

The following NEW packages will be installed:
  akonadi-backend-mysql akonadi-server libkf5akonadi-data libkf5akonadicore5
  libkf5akonadiprivate5 libkf5akonadiwidgets5 libqt5sql5-mysql
  mariadb-client-core-10.3 mariadb-common mariadb-server-core-10.3

So here, it is installing a mariaDB server (a fork of MySQL).