Years later, kmail still is not a viable email client?

[René J.V. Bertin]

On Saturday October 17 2020 17:27:46 Dave Close wrote:

>IMO time to stop depending on KMail to tell you what it is doing. Run
>tcpdump (-s0 -wfile) concurrently with your connection attempt. Maybe
>that will give you some clues.

+++, or just a simple netstat -a to see if the expected connection remains open indefinitely.

And try with one or more other accounts. If they all fail with similar symptoms, check what akonadi packages you have installed (`aptitude reinstall foo1 foo2`) and double-check there's nothing obvious missing or marked broken (`aptitude search akonadi`).

No one here would ask you for your actual credentials, of course, but it would help to know what email provider you are dealing with, and what the other connection details are.

> I don't understand what it means to couple these settings in KMail.

I presume Stakanov referred to the fact that you can select a connection type (e.g. STARTTLS) and override the portnumber by entering a different value in the corresponding widget.

Here's another thought: from where did you install Thunderbird? If from Mozilla's own packaging and not Debian's you will have the latest version that IIRC also comes with its own set of certificate validation data. KMail doesn't but depends on the host to have this data up-to-date. Normally I'd expect a fast rejection error if a connection certificate cannot be validated but I suppose a remote server can also be configured to hang the client in that case (as a protection against brute force attacks).

R