When will akonadi work with Gmail?

[Martin Steigerwald]

Dear Jesus.

I refrained from commenting on this at first, but now I do so:

Please move this discussion to kdepim-users – if you feel you must 
continue it. I made the first step by using kdepim-users address and only 
added kde-core-devel as blind carbon copy. In case you like to organize 
help, maybe kde-community mailing list would be good, but I believe it 
is better that you re-evaluate the tone in your mails first. But please 
read to receive the complete message I have for you:

Jesus Varela - 14.11.19, 04:36:25 CET:
> I am always afraid the KDE will lose support or interest from other
> platforms since most of the Linux distros are choosing GNOME as the
> default. Will this mean that there will be less support for KDE
> applications? Evolution seems to work well when set up through GNOME
> Online Accounts, but KOA is not as easy. KMail doesn't work with
> Google at least. KOrganizer, same thing. It doesn't seem to sync.

As far as I am aware adapting to new requirements of Google requires a 
privacy statement that AFAIK is being worked on by KDE e.V.

As this is a legal statement it requires proper care to do properly. 
Daniel Vrátil had a quick go at it, and Google rejected it. Which in my 
eyes has an irony in itself, cause Google's business model is 
capitalizing on user data. So KDE and KDEPIM developers in my opinion 
provided better privacy to begin with, even without a privacy 
declaration. In my eyes Google is not be in position to nit-pick about 
the privacy others provide or not provide, but as GMail has such a wide 
reach, they seemingly think they can.

That being written, a privacy statement is good to have anyway. And I am 
grateful for the Google Summer of Code initiative. (It is never just 
black and white.)

In addition to that I like to note that after Google there is not the 
end of the world. There is a ton of other mail service providers out 
there and also people like me who administrate their own mail server. 
KDEPIM for sure works well enough for me. It for sure is not perfect, 
especially Akonadi, but I still prefer KMail over any other mail client. 
I am sure it works well enough for many other users as well.

> I am enjoying Plasma but if there will not be sufficient support for
> the applications, it makes it hard to stay on it and to recommend it
> to others. Especially if they are just starting out with Linux.

Jesus, I really do not like the tone of it as I receive it. Feel free to 
tell me that you did not mean it that way, in case you feel I did not 
receive it in the way you meant it.

To me it sounds like this: Demand, demand, demand and then a threat. 
Yet, I have never seen demanding getting any work done.

Yes, it is important to improve KDEPIM and Akonadi. But someone still 
has to do it and there are not all that many someone's currently willing 
and able to. So it needs time.

The GMail issue is known and the privacy declaration is, AFAIK, being 
worked on by people of KDE e.V. So it is not even a KDE application 
thing at the moment. It is a legal document, so also will need time. So 
please carefully review whether you can contribute to make that happen, 
or whether some patience would be more appropriate instead of making a 
fuss about this on KDE mailing lists.

Thanks,
Martin

> JV
> 
> On Wed, Nov 13, 2019, 13:35 Wolfgang Bauer <wbauer at tmo.at> wrote:
> > See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=404990 .
> > 
> > In short, it's not a bug in kmail or akonadi, but rather a
> > "political" problem
> > because Google themselves blocked access.
> > 
> > Doesn't mean it shouldn't get fixed from the KDE side though, rather
> > the opposite.
> > But me personally don't really know what the remaining problems are.
> > 
> > Maybe somebody else here can step up and finally help to solve it?
> > 
> > Kind Regards,
> > Wolfgang
-- 
Martin