[Kde-pim] KDE Bug #146247 - Corporate Reliability

[Dyllan Pascoe]

Dear KDE Development Team,


Let me first start off by commending you for wonderful Open Source software. 
KDE in general is a great Desktop Environment and our business has been using 
it for well over 3 years. It is because of Community's like yours that people 
can be free of unruly licensing schemes, and enjoy free and open functional 
software applications.

Having said that we are troubled by the Bug in subject. Our company relies 
heavily on quick email communication being in the Freight Forwarding 
Business. We are finding it very difficult to effectively use KMail while it 
does not autocomplete email address's from, 'Recent Addresses', internal 
LDAP Server & individually created Address Books.

When composing an email our staff now need to click on the 'Select' button to 
the right of the composer window and type in the desired email address (1 by 
1 i might add), which will then filter the list from the user input. This is 
extremely frustrating and a slow way to work. In an earlier version of KMail 
the user would only need to type the first few letters of the desired email 
address in the To,CC,BCC Field and be prompted with the closest matches to 
quickly select.

As i have mentioned on the Bug List itself i do understand that all effort is 
now focused on KDE4 and manpower cannot be spent on this bug, however i feel 
that this flaw in KMail 3.5.x leaves a lot to be desired, the software is 
incomplete without the autocomplete function and cannot be considered as 
fully functional. I have spent almost 4 weeks researching this Bug for a 
possible fix but alas none. In the process i have visited countless linux 
forums specific to their distributions and read a number of requests for a 
resolution to this bug.

Just for some background, our company name is Megafreight and we are located 
in South Africa. 5 years ago our Managing Director and myself brainstormed 
for an alternative to Micro$oft and to try and avoid the software giant at 
all costs. Since then we have implemented 5 fully functional linux desktop 
servers (in a terminal service environment), at 5 different branches around 
South Africa, servicing +-250 users. We use Gentoo as our distro of choice 
and KDE as our Desktop Environment with the Kontact suite handling our Email, 
Address Book, Calendaring needs extremely well. We recently switched Email 
Applications from Thunderbird to KMail for a couple reasons, 1 being that we 
found KMail a lot faster/smoother and also because of the shared calendar.

Right now we cannot explore the option of upgrading to KDE4 for a couple 
reasons, most importantly being that it is not marked stable on Gentoo as of 
yet, and KDE3 is working for us nicely except for this bug which is a pain in 
our side, so we do live by the policy "if it's not broken, don't fix it". So 
we would rather wait for it to be stable before upgrading, but we cannot do 
with the autocomplete function.

We would really like your thoughts and feedback concerning our request and we 
truly hope that some time can be spent patching this bug. Having said that we 
understand that time is money and we would like to make a generous donation 
to the KDE Community, not purely for this bug to be patched, but because we 
feel that it is the right thing to do, and because we use KDE on a day to day 
basis, even though more recently KMail, we will also be setting up a yearly 
donation for as long as we use the software which we hope will be for a very 
long time to come.

We look forward to your reply and hope that you will accept our invitation.
A donation will be made shortly, as i said above, wether or not our invitation 
to patch the bug is accepted, so if you would like the specifics on the 
donation we will be happy to provide this on request.

Thank you for your time.


Server information
Intel Xeon 2.4
Kernel 2.6.23-gentoo-r6
kde-base/kmail-3.5.8


http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=146247

-- 
Kind Regards,
Dyllan Pascoe

Megafreight Services (Pty) Ltd
Cape Town, South Africa
Tel: +27 (0)21 413 4300
Fax: +27 (0)86 682 0096
www.megafreight.co.za

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