Need help diagnosing Plasma activities error preventing kmail from running

Help
1

I have somehow managed to get my PIM applications into a state that they will not start.

When attempting to start kmail it prints “Personal information management service is starting…” but then eventually prints “A required background service is not operational.” without successfully opening my mail account.

If starting from a terminal these messages are printed:
$ kmail
org.kde.pim.pimcommonactivities: Plasma activities is not running: 1
org.kde.pim.akonadicore: Job error: “” for collection: QList()
org.kde.pim.akonadicore: Job error: “” for collection: QList()
org.kde.pim.messagelist: Failed to load tags “”
org.kde.pim.kmail: “”
org.kde.pim.mailcommon: failed to retrieve tags “”

I wanted to update my mariadb installation from 10.16 to 11.8 on Fedora 43, and because of the way the Fedora 43 packages were structured that caused some conflicts with packages which required mariadb or mysql. I temporarily removed akonadi-server-mysql while getting all the package dependencies sorted, and have since also updated my base system to Fedora 44.
Since updating I have reinstalled kmail, akonadi-server-mysql, verified that the Akonadi service is running after logging in, and ran akonadictl vacuum and akonadictl fsck to verify the Akonadi database was OK.
The fsck did find quite a few unreferenced files in .local/share/akonadi/file_db_data but it did complete the consistency check.

The Plasma packages installed in Fedora 44 are 6.6.4, and the KDE applications are 26.04.0.
Do the above error messages about Plasma activities not running point to an obvious place I should investigate? I do not understand the interaction between Akonadi and the PIM applications like kmail and kaddressbook well enough to know where to start.

2

hi, welcome to the club.

all i can offer is that to get the PIM integrated into the digital clock/calendar widget you will need to install kdepim-addons

the rest of it is just confusing to me and i’m hoping when i move to kubuntu 26.04 that a lot of this will get sorted out, but calendar stuff has been a major weak point in plasma for a long time now.

3

I was really hoping there would be more technical expertise in this forum.

Any hint for where I might find people who understand how the PIM pieces work together? Do I need to get on a developer mailing list or something?

4

i think KDE is looking for them too… so if you find one please ask them to help us.

or become the technical expert you wish existed.