March/April KDE PIM summary blog post

[Volker Krause]

On Montag, 26. April 2021 17:30:41 CEST Volker Krause wrote:
> [...]

Thank you for all the input!

Since nobody volunteered to assemble the post and we are running out of time I 
did that again, please review the draft below. Unless there are objections, 
I'd aim for publishing this tomorrow.

Regards,
Volker


---
layout: post
title: March/April in KDE PIM
date: 2021-05-01 10:00:00 +0200
image: /assets/posts/85/kolibri-email-browser.png
---

Two weeks ago we saw the release of [Kontact](https://kontact.kde.org/) 
21.04.0, and since the [last report]({{ site.baseurl }}{% link _posts/
2021-03-01-kde-pim-january-februrary-2021.md %}) we again had more than 1400 
changes by more than 30 contributors going in. Here are some of the 
highlights.

### Kontact

The a large focus remains preparing the upcoming migration to Qt6 and KF6.
This mainly consists of porting away from deprecated functionality in Qt and 
KDE Frameworks, as well as language features that are incompatible with C++17. 
While not having any visible impact right now, this will allow for a smoother 
transition down the line.

Not only code needs to be updated, Carl also updated and extended
[a tutorial on how to develop Akonadi-based applications](https://
develop.kde.org/docs/akonadi/using_akonadi_applications/)
from the KDE4 era.

### KMail

Ingo implemented two improvements for the message structure view (which
allows having a look at the internal structure of email messages). This work 
was funded by Intevation GmbH.
* Allow deletion of attachments from message structure view (bug 436089).
* Allow the message structure view to grow/shrink as much as sensible (bug 
436044).

While working on those improvements, a security issue that is triggered by
deleting unencrypted attachments attached to encrypted messages was found and
fixed. For details see [the corresponding advisory](https://kde.org/info/
security/advisory-20210429-1.txt).

Sandro continued his work on easing the use of email encryption:
* KMail now takes [Autocrypt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autocrypt) keys 
into account when you create new messages and shows encryption support for 
Autocrypt recipient already in the message composer (bug 388036).
* The encryption/signing status has been fixed when changing your identity in 
message composer. The status is now recalculated for all recipients and 
disabled for those identities that doesn't have any encryption key. This 
avoids ending up with unencrypted mails by changing identities as the 
encryption/signing recommendations got lost.

Laurent improved the "external script" plugin and implemented support for more 
argument values there, and continued ongoing work on mailmerge support (ie. 
sending templated emails to a number of different recipients).

{% include figure.html filename="/assets/posts/85/kmail-external-script-
plugin-config.png"
    caption="Configuration of KMail's external scripts plugin."
    alternative_text="Screenshot of the configuration dialog of KMail's 
external scripts plugin."
%}

And there's a number of noteworthy fixes as well:
* Fix first name insertion via editor variables in the email composer (bug 
435431).
* Also handle the `message/global` mimetype (bug 434392).
* Fix activation of default sieve scripts (bug 423189).
* Make the Copy/Move actions in the message reader window work consistently 
(bug 435410).
* Add a new message operation "New Message to Recipients".
* Fix handling of quoted commas in recipient names (bug 433921).

KMail also received a major update to its user manual, thanks to David Bryant.

And finally there's of course Carl's work on a Kirigami/Plasma Mobile frontend 
for KMail, codenamed Kolibri, as you might have spotted already in a
[recent Plasma Mobile blog post](https://www.plasma-mobile.org/2021/04/27/
plasma-mobile-update-march-april/). This is still in its very early stages and 
builds on top of the same backend libraries as KMail does, resulting in a 
number of improvements to those already, in particular related to QML 
compatibility.

{% include figure.html filename="/assets/posts/85/kolibri-email-browser.png"
    caption="Kolibri with email list and email reader."
    alternative_text="Screenshot of Kolibri showing the email list and email 
reader."
%}

### KOrganizer

Glen contributed a number of improvements to calendaring:
* When deleting a recurring to-do, let the user choose between deleting "just 
this instance", "this and future instances", or "all instances", as is done 
when deleting recurring events and moving recurring to-dos and events.
* Do not displayed bogus error dialogs when deleting recurring events and to-
dos that have dissociated instances.
* Don't crash if an agenda item is deleted while it is being moved (bug 
435352).
* Use "tag" consistently in the UI and documentation, instead of a mixture of 
"tag" and "category".
* Improved portability of exported calendars (bug 169336).
* Add time and time zone to `EXDATE`s of `DATE-TIME` instances (bug 434599).

### Kleopatra

* Support for groups of keys is now ready for testing.
* Kleopatra has been adapted to changes in the configuration of the recently 
released GnuPG 2.3.
* The validity of keys that are looked up remotely is now displayed as "not 
checked" instead of as "not certified".

### Akregator

Laurent started to implement the ability to block external content displayed 
in Akregator (similar to what KMail already does), as a way to improve privacy 
when browsing RSS feeds.

There were a number of other noteworthy improvements as well:
* Avoid accidentally generating reserved values of feed IDs.
* Treat feed IDs as unsigned everywhere (bug 429444).
* Fix empty article list after changes in Qt.
* Allow to lock feeds in place (bug 354983).

### Help to make Kontact even better!

Take a look at some of the junior jobs that we have! They are simple, mostly 
programming tasks that don’t require any deep knowledge or understanding of 
Kontact, so anyone can work on them. Feel free to pick any task from the list 
and reach out to us! We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your 
questions.
[Read more here…](https://www.dvratil.cz/2018/08/kde-pim-junior-jobs-are-opened)
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