Kmail works by itself but won't integrate w/ Kontact (Solved)

Help
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1

Spent a few hours on this one. Was writing up my issue and then came across a solution that worked for me, so sharing the goods.

Problem
I am running proton mail → hydroxide server → KMail successfully, and decided to leverage Kmail by installing Kontact, but none of the folders for the external account loaded, so it was just a blank Inbox page.

I do know the connection was successful tho because

  1. the progress bar shows data being processed when Check mail
  2. I can see all of my Proton folders if I view the Server-Side subscriptions settings.
  3. kmail is working as expected

I was attempting it via the Kontact flatpak initially, but experienced the same issue on the Debian repo version as well

Solution
For me, the identity name I selected followed the naming convention of Firstname L. (w/ emphasis on the period). In retrospect, this had already screwed me over in the past (broke an attempted kup restore), and it appears to be the contributing factor here as well:

  1. I searched for likely mail/akonadi-related files that had FirstName L.to manually remove the period. I used ripgrep: ~/.config$ rg -. "Firstname L."
  2. Go back to the Kontact and rename the identity to something w/o a period
  3. Restart Kontact
2

Related/Unrelated but upgrading Debian broke Kontact’s ability to send email.

It appears that my settings were overrode and suddenly encryption was forced to SSL which is incompatible w/ my setup. I had to undo that to get it to work

3

Another issue I ran into today was suddenly, Kmail started launching separately from Kontact, as a standalone app. I found a solution on StackOverflow IIRC:

  1. Close Kmail/Aggregator, etc from the bottom-right side panel
  2. Close Kontact completely w/ Ctrl+q
  3. Restart Kontact

Hopefully that’s the extent of troubleshooting for the immediate future.