akonadi / kmail / gmail

[Duncan]

superaorta posted on Thu, 23 Aug 2018 22:05:35 +0100 as excerpted:

> - If you know if clementine or another kmail replacement is around that
> would be great.

> Basically _anything_ to get my email working as it should be.
> 
> Akoanadi is the bane of my computing life and trying to get bugs fixed
> is, well pointless.  I hope someone is working on something better for
> the next version of kde!

Let's just say that I'm no akonadi fan either, and that I found reason 
enough to leave it behind some time ago.  No point in beating a dead 
horse, as they say...

One very wholehearted recommendation of what I ended up switching to, and 
another that I considered...

1)  I ended up switching to (gtk-based) claws-mail here, and love it.  
One feature stressed heavily is claws' heavy configurability and 
scriptable expansibility, with a page on the claws site making available 
various user-submitted scripts.  That means they're extremely unlikely to 
jump the database shark that kmail did with akonadi, because it would 
kill scriptability, a major reason claws-mail exists.  Hotkeys are 
configurable and all functionality is exposed for hotkey configuration.  
Many features, including the tray icon functionality (which works well 
here!), are actually supported via plugins.  Claws doesn't support HTML 
mail composition as its users don't tend to want it, but it does support 
reading HTML mail, including the mode I use, which rather than actually 
parsing the HTML, simply converts HTML/XML to standard text impressively 
well, well enough that I use it for following my RSS/Atom feeds (which 
are fetched and presented in claws using another plugin).

The biggest down side I've found is that it's single-threaded and its 
dialogs tend to be modal, so you have to close them in ordered to 
continue working in the main window, and it'll check mail addresses (if 
you have more than one) only one at a time.  (By contrast, my gtk-based 
news/nntp client, pan, uses modeless dialogs for pretty much everything; 
so I can switch between the main window and various dialogs without 
closing any of them.  I'm active on the pan list and that's handy when 
referring to them in a reply to a question, for instance.  And it multi-
threads parallel downloading and uploading using multiple connections to/
from multiple servers at once, but it does nntp, not mail, and not feeds 
either, so I need claws as well.)

But I don't use claws with imap, so while I know it supports it, I can't 
honestly say how well it works in that regard.

https://www.claws-mail.org/ , and should a reasonably mature version in 
most distro repos.

2) Trojita is a qt5-based imap (not pop3, the reason I didn't try it) 
mail client that while pure qt (no kde deps) is now developed under the 
kde umbrella.  I'm acquainted with the original developer (he was a gentoo 
dev at the time and I'm a gentooer) and find it quite interesting, but at 
the time I switched I needed a POP3 client and trojita does only imap, 
not pop3, so unfortunately it wouldn't have worked for me and I've never 
had a chance to try it.  But I suppose gmail is accessible via imap, so 
it should work for you, and because trojita is designed for speed on 
large imap folders, it could work quite well with gmail.

Because it's qt-based it should integrate better with kde/plasma than the 
gtk-based claws-mail, but as I've not used it I've no idea whether it has 
a tray icon.

http://trojita.flaska.net/ , and is in some distro repos but may not be 
in all of them yet, and may be outdated in others, a potentially big 
issue as it's only a few years old so if it's a few years outdated it 
could be a pretty early version...


Let me know if you have questions about claws, and if you try trojita, 
how it works (or not) for you.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman