Konqueror and KMail for a Month
I have used Firefox and Thunderbird for many years now. I like both of them a lot. However, I have decided to learn a bit more about two of the big components of the KDE Desktop Environment: Konqueror and KMail. I have decided to spend at least a month using both of them.
Konqueror, of course, is the KDE "Do Everything" application: web browser, file manager, and desktop keeper-upper. And KMail is KDE's email client. So what's to learn and what's the big deal? Why even consider spending even a minute or two on either one of them? Isn't there sufficient documentation and information on using both of these applications? And aren't there other KDE components that are "worthy"? Yes, there probably has already been plenty written about them. But web browsing and email reading and writing are probably the two biggest uses of computers that "Joe Sixpack" performs.
I have used Konqueror and KMail off and on over the years. But I have never spent enough time with either one of them to learn their subtleties, or the good, and bad points of them.
So I shall spend at least one month using Konqueror and KMail exclusively. I shall then describe my findings, at least those that I think might be slightly interesting. 
I want to learn how good Konqueror's pop-up blocker is, and how good KMail's spam and other filters are. I am sure that I shall learn more important items in time.
One thing that I have found out about Konqueror is this. For most of my editing needs in Linux, I am a "vi guy" (sorry, I've never really "gotten" emacs). So I have found that while using Konqueror, in "browser" mode, that I can move up and down a website's page by using the "j" (scroll down) and "k" (scroll up) keys. Very nice that I do not have to take my hands of the keyboard for a while.
I shall go into more detail in a later post, but one thing that I think is important to bring up now for KMail is this. I have used the "Import" function to bring over all of my email from Thunderbird. I happen to have history going back to 1999, and it is in many folders. It was imported into the "Thunderbird-Import" folder for further processing. The integrity of all of those folders was maintained but when I went to move the folders out of Thunderbird-Import to other folders, I found that email messages were destroyed! Fortunately, I discovered the solution. Rather than MOVING a folder, it is much better select the emails in a folder and copy the emails to the other folder. Once they have been copied, then you can delete the original emails. Why is this necessary? I think it is because the underlying "maildir" structure of KMail can get horribly messed up if you pass too much information into it at one instant. But by doing the copy, the directories, files, and indices can be properly created. This is just a guess on my part.
Anyway, I will report my results at the end of the month. In the meantime, please post the things that you like or don't like about Konqueror or KMail. I would, of course, prefer to see the things that you like about these applications so that I might try them out. If you wish to tell me about what you don't like, please try to be constructive. In other words, please tell me how you think "the problem" can be worked around or made to work better. It does no one any good to hear you tell me, "Kmail sucks!". Gee, thank you for sharing
Jon
Kmail crash save?
Posts: 275
Hi Jon,
My subject line refers to a feature I'd like to see in Kmail (or Thunderbird, or anywhere)--but wonder if it might not already be there. If you discover it in your investigation, please let us know.
I'm referring to a draft-save feature for preserving text if the program crashes. I don't recall having this feature in any email program, yet Abiword and other word processors manage it very well.
I wonder if others have this experience. To me it is a *major* irritation when, like last night, I was composing a long and thoughtful email when--boom--the program had to "close" and all text was lost. This happened in Thunderbird (and to be ultra-fair, it was in Windows....). But it's happened to me before and I can't be sure it wasn't in Linux Thunderbird or Kmail.
Anything you or others might know about this would be really useful.
--Malanrich
Edit:
To be clearer: I'm talking about an automatic save at the moment of crash. I assume a manual save into the draft folder is already available everywhere, but that seems needlessly cumbersome.
Automatic Save
Posts: 5513
Hi Mark.
Although there are those who want computers to do things "just before they crash", that usually is not possible. About the best that can be done is "saving frequently" so that it might be saved before a crash.
For KMail, what I have found to set autosave is this. Choose Settings -> Configure KMail -> Composer -> General tab -> set Autosave interval. On my system it is currently set at 2 minutes.
Oops, minor emergency at home. So I can't check Thunderbird settings yet. I'm certain there is a similar setting. I'll check later
Jon
I'm your worst nightmare: A Geek with an Attitude!
Proud Charter Member of
Da Mepis Posse 
Re: Automatic Save
Posts: 275
Quote: "About the best that can be done is 'saving frequently' so that it might be saved before a crash."
One reason I switched from Thunderbird to Kmail was an occasional bug that crashed Thunderbird when hitting "send reply" or even "save draft." Complete loss of text. No doubt the solution is less about finding the right settings than getting a de-bugged version of the application.
I'm still puzzled as to why Abiword can save a crashing file almost instantly (??). Oh well.
Thanks, Jon, for describing any crashing experiences you may have during your month o' Kmail.
C'mon guys....
Posts: 2299
Thunderbird has had an autosave feature ever since version 1.5.
Edit > preferences > Composition > General - Autosave every X minutes
Newbie or not Newbie, there's always a question
Re: Autosave
Posts: 275
Autosave is good but I can write a lot in a minute (the minimum setting in Kmail). Actually, I got out of the habit of using autosave back in my Windows days because it bloated Word documents or gobbled memory that it wouldn't let go of. (The first thing I was told about Word was "disable autosave!") So now I'm wishing we had some kind of instantaneous save in memory at the moment of crash--independent of autosave. Okay, I'm being overly fussy...
What I should have done is to check what programs like Abiword really do at crash. As I think about it, the program more likely preserves the document from the latest save point (manual or autosave).
I will do the same - use konq + kmail for 1 month
Posts: 959
I have 5 email accounts and I get a huge volume of email, each account has it's own folder within thunderbird, and emails were not mixed into the main localfolders, so setting up and transferring my data took close to 3 hours by the time I had correctly configured my secure server accounts, created and sorted the folders and imported the address book and set up kmail profiles so I could choose what account I was sending emails from.
On my to-do list is to find out how to get bcc to appear in the email address selection fields.
One thing I like and have already used with Konqueror is the option to print directly to PDF from KDE applications from my online quoting site, and along with your post, was the principle reason for my taking the plunge.
Mike P
--------------------
Life may not be the party we thought, but while we're here, we may as well dance.
Break M$'s shackles from your feet and free yourself with Mepis
how to get bcc to appear
Posts: 4864
On my to-do list is to find out how to get bcc to appear in the email address selection fields.
click on the TO
you can select TO CC BCC
when you fill in one address you get another blank box for a second and so on
and how not to get BCC to appear?
well as BCC is a very common skin cancer, stay out of the sun, guys
Thanks for The BCC Tip
Posts: 5513
Thanks for the BCC tip Liz.
Now that I am using KMail, I want to see if I can get clamav to work properly with it. I have clamav running, but I think I need to fix it. The message I get from the cron daemon when running /usr/bin/freshclam is:
ERROR: Clamd was NOT notified: Can't connect to clamd through /var/run/clamav/clamd.ctl connect(): No such file or directory
When I run freshclam from the command line I get this:
# freshclam ClamAV update process started at Wed Dec 6 19:33:10 2006 main.cvd is up to date (version: 41, sigs: 73809, f-level: 10, builder: tkojm) WARNING: Your ClamAV installation is OUTDATED! WARNING: Current functionality level = 8, recommended = 10 DON'T PANIC! Read http://www.clamav.net/faq.html daily.cvd is up to date (version: 2295, sigs: 6228, f-level: 9, builder: diego) WARNING: Your ClamAV installation is OUTDATED! WARNING: Current functionality level = 8, recommended = 9 DON'T PANIC! Read http://www.clamav.net/faq.html
According to synaptic, the version I have installed is the latest in the Ubuntu repository: 0.88.4-1ubuntu1. I don't know whether I should go out to clamav.net and download the most recent version. Thoughts?
Jon
I'm your worst nightmare: A Geek with an Attitude!
Proud Charter Member of
Da Mepis Posse
Found a minor issue with html mails
Posts: 959
The online quote system I referred to above emails out printable html quotes and kmail does not display them correctly and the HTML Statusbar reckons it is not a html email. Maybe kmail has an issue with tables because copying the formatted text directly from a thunderbird email to a blank nvu page results in a page made with tables.
The way around this is to add a toolbar icon that strangely has no icon, but a transparent box named "Prefer HTML to Plain Text" Setting this brings up a warning message about spam but at least the message is displayed correctly.
This minor issue is not so much they are not formatted correctly, but nore that the HTML Status bar identifies it as non-html when the email body really is html.
Thunderbird used to have this issue too, but I remember I changed a setting and they displayed as intended.
Thanks to DrLizau for the bcc quote, in NZ, we have the harshest sun due to the big ozone hole above us, but I'm of mediterranean descent so my burn time appears to be 3-4 times that of the locals, though that's not quite what I was referring to and being a computer geek who lives in the dark, what is sun???
Mike P
--------------------
Life may not be the party we thought, but while we're here, we may as well dance.
Break M$'s shackles from your feet and free yourself with Mepis
html mail in kmail
Posts: 4864
to show properly any sort of html mail
go to the last little box that appears when you have html mail
there's a table
description type encoding size
under type one line is html document. click on that line
a whole lot of excess stuff like
!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3c.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd">
Suggests
Posts: 1634
Konq:
Drag-n-drop ftp. (I'm at 50/50 between gftp and Konq.)
If you need to make image galleries, it's under Tools.
Fiddle with site rendering by using different User Agent strings.
KMail:
Set your MDN policy to Ignore.
Use GnuPG as your crypto backend.
You can cron job daily changes to your sig file.
Stack your filters with your whitelisted addys at the top, and blacklisted addys at the bottom, with the stop processing here on filter match (great for html emails).
I'll think of more after I've had some sleep.
My occupation?
Well, computer geek-stuff, mostly. I could tell you all about it; but, then I would have to delete you.