KMail dependence on Akonadi

[Kevin Krammer]

On Saturday, 2017-07-08, 02:37:22, Aleksey Midenkov wrote:
> By what purpose there is KMail dependence on other services?

The purpose if the dependency is to make KMail work.
I.e. in order for KMail to display or send emails it needs to access emails.

Access to data such as emails, contacts, calendar, etc., is shared between 
applications through the Akonadi service (PIM data, personal information 
management).

E.g. for an email program like KMail it doen't matter whether an email folder 
is stored locally or on an IMAP server, it just requests the folder's contents 
from the service.

Such all email programs can access the same data cooperatively.

Same obviously applies for addressbooks, calendars, etc. [1]

In short it is a system allowing PIM data to be share between applications, 
without requiring users to run their own groupware server like Kolab or 
Exchange.

Similar approaches are used by GNOME [2] and mobile platforms [3].

> Can it work standalone?

For a standalone data silo approach you can, for email, have a look at 
Thunderbird, Claws and many others.

Cheers,
Kevin

[1] Access to PIM data is not necessarily just interesting for PIM user 
programs. An invoicing application could access the addressbook, create and 
send an email with the invoice and add a calendar entry with a reminder to 
check for payment.

It allows specialized programs to only work on a subset of data. E.g. 
https://zanshin.kde.org/ is specialized on handling TODOs but a user still has 
access to those TODOs through a traditional calendaring application, e.g. 
KOrganizer.

[2] Evolution Data Server, EDS

[3] Mobile platforms such as Android, iOS, etc., also handle PIM accounts 
centrally via the platform's PIM service. Different apps, depending on the 
user's choice on access rights, then access that data independent of which 
account it came from.

-- 
Kevin Krammer, KDE developer, xdg-utils developer
KDE user support, developer mentoring
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