KMail dependence on Akonadi

[Aleksey Midenkov]

On Sat, Jul 8, 2017 at 11:34 AM, Kevin Krammer <krammer at kde.org> wrote:
> 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.

Can't it work via shared library, e.g. SQLite or some NoSQL technologies?

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

Is it common case? I mean are there many people who use contacts,
calendar (what else?). Or there are majority who just use e-mail.
Can't data be shared via dynamic library API? AFAIK no-server
databases can support multi-process R/W access. Why you invented some
service if there are commonly used SQL servers? Do you have many human
resources to support new technology? Isn't its current quality is
still at unusable rate? Wouldn't it be better to make shared interface
to SQL language and use common solutions?

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

I used KMail at time of KDE 3 and I like its features (especially for
supporting managesieve). But I don't like its dependency on additional
processes, so for many years now I use web UI for mail.

>
> 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