Hello, I got a few questions about KMail, and I hope someone here can help me.
Why is KMail pushed into the background? Links on the app’s page aren’t working anymore, and a manual search in the handbook shows that all pages are deleted. Also, I can’t find any changelogs anywhere.
What is the point of identities? I feel like this system makes it incredibly complex to set up a new mail account, as I need to manage the receive and send SMTP servers and the identities in three different tabs. Removing an account still leaves the identity behind. Compared to Thunderbird/Betterbird, I simply add my mail account and I’m ready to go.
I am using a catch-all system on my mail server. Do I need to add an identity for every different local part I want to send from? Can’t I simply select the account (SMTP server) in the compose window and then change the local part manually? The last times I tried that it failed. I cannot guarantee that this isn’t an error elsewhere in the config. In Betterbird it works perfectly.
Does KMail support push notifications? Somewhere online I read yes, but it doesn’t seem to work for me. The notification appears either a few minutes late or never. Do I need to configure something manually for this to work? And why is this spread across like three different config windows?
Why doesn’t KMail get the right mail server settings on its own? I feel like this makes the whole process more complex compared to Betterbird. I need to set up the server details and folder setup. KMail doesn’t conclude that a folder named “Junk” could be the spam folder. I need to set up every single base folder and functionality on my own. I am using a self‑hosted Mailcow instance, but Betterbird manages this, so it should be possible.
This is not meant as a rant or “but the other one does it better,” just me trying to understand a few things and pointing out how I know some things from a different program, showing that those things are possible.
If you mean the link on apps.kde.org that seems to work for me.
If you mean a different link and it doesn’t work then this could be reported as a bug against the website.
What do you mean by that?
I just pressed F1 in KMail and its handbook came up.
I can also open Help Center and search for KMail in there.
It is part of the KDE Gear release changelogs for example here
To enable advanced users multiple configurations per email servers.
For example you might have different roles at work. The server setup will be the same but you might want to send/reply differently as an individual or as a member of a certain project or team.
It has been ages since I needed to create a new email account but that was essentially the same approach.
If it is a known provider you only needed to provide username/email and credentials and it knew servers and created the identity.
I vaguely remember creating a custom setup but even that created the identity for me.
I am not sure what you mean but I have never had to create an identity unless I wanted it to be a different configuration.
View→Mail Transport
Not entirely sure what you mean but in case you mean but this might depend a lot on the connector and the capabilities of the server.
I think the IMAP connector supports “IMAP Idle” if the server supports it.
As I said above, it has been ages since I added a new account but it had an account wizard that knew a lot of settings for common providers.
For unknown providers it will need to ask for the server name but can usually detect the capabilities when asked to do so.
I guess that depends a lot on the server.
IMAP allows attributes and tags on folders to communicate such roles.
Going just by name is not really viable without knowledge of the language settings of the program which created the folders.
If I create a folder called “Postausgang” in a program in German, how would a different program in English determine that this means “outbox”?