Sorry. I moved to KDE after 6 years as a Gnome user. I used Evolution in Gnome, but it will install too much extraneous garbage if I try to install it in KDE so I am opting for Thunderbird instead.

I liked the look of KMail, but had issues getting some very basic functionality to work correctly. Most notably, the spam filtering is difficult at best. I have SpamAssassin running on my (remote) mail server so that picks up some stuff. Then I installed Bogofilter for KMail and that was extremely aggressive with no readily apparent way to calm it down. I would manually mark mail as Ham and it would filter the next mail from that sender as Spam again. Even after several times. There is no way to simply set up a white list either. I created a folder in my personal contacts called Whitelist and right-clicked several emails and added them to my contact list in that folder. I created a filter that says, "If this is in my contacts list, do nothing, and stop processing" and it was the first filter in the list. It got ignored about 90% of the time. It's been a couple of weeks. I think I gave it a good try, but in the end I'm done with it.

I installed Thunderbird. Configured my email account (I use imap so no mail gets locked into an email client) and set up one filter for SpamAssassin and it works. The built-in spam filter is catching almost all junk mail.

Email programs are a core necessity and should be simple to configure. And spam filtering is such a big deal it should work out-of-the-box in a relatively reliable way. KMail was just too much hassle.

Kind of a disappointment as I'm really enjoying everything else about my decision to switch to KDE.

I'm giving up on KMail too...
Encryption and digital signing should work out of the box when everything is set up in KGpg, but it doesn't ;-(

I'm going to ask about this in another thread, but I've decided life is too short to use buggy email clients, especially when Thunderbird is available.
Chris

@yardbird: bogofilter is excellent, once it's trained, but you need a large body of both ham and spam to train it. You would be advised to join the bogofilter mailing list to get help. I use it on my server, and it's a long time since I used it directly in kmail, so I can really only give generalisations.

@cgriffin: I use gpg with kmail without problems (apart from one exception, now resolved) and have done for years. Maybe a more detailed description of your problem in a separate post will find the reason and the cure.

I'm all set now, thank you! Have not given up yet, because TBird has its own annoyances...

And TBird doesn't have the expiry option that does so much of the housekeeping for you.

If I can figure out the spam filtering AND get a whitelist working, I'd go back to KMail. I'm doing some reading about how to train bogofilter. Is it going to be more difficult because I connect to a remote imap mail server and never download mail to my local machine?

I have LOTS of "ham" on the imap server, but I usually delete the junk mail. So I don't have thousands of spam messages to train with.

I HAVE discovered that my contacts folder is not where most articles on the new KMail say it should be. It's actually in 2 locations now and I have to learn how to handle this as well.

I filter on my IMAP server. http://userbase.kde.org/KMail/FAQs_Hint ... MAP_server tells how I use bogofilter on the server instead of local filtering, so you should be able to adapt that method even if you don't use procmail.

For training, then, move spam mail to your bogotrain-spam folder until you have at hundred or so, and copy a representative sample of ham into the bogotrain-ham folder. When you have the sample ready, ssh into the server, then, in your user home directory run
bash /usr/share/bogofilter/contrib/contrib/trainbogo.sh -c -H /home/you/Maildir/.INBOX.Bogotrain_ham/cur/ -S /home/you/Maildir/.INBOX.Bogotrain_spam/cur/

(all on one line, of course) adapted to your setup.