You want to click on a link in KMail and have it opened in Firefox. At the moment, another browser is used. You want to change this.

This solution will affect all of KDE, not just KMail. Start System Settings → Default Applications → Web Browser → Open http and https URLs in the following browser → firefox.

If you are an administrator and want to set this setting automatically for your users, it is

You can also use the script in Tutorials/Modify_KDE_Software_Defaults

You set up a Roaming profile to access your home server while you are on the road, but it keeps trying to connect even when you are at home. Auto-connection is disabled in the setup screens.

Settings → Configure KMail → Accounts → Receiving (tab) → (select the account to exclude) → Retrieval Options, uncheck Include in Manual Mail Check. This will exclude the profile when you hit the download icon, but the profile will still be available from the drop-down list, making it easy to get your mail while away from home.

Symptom: You want to store mails in a special folder. Maybe you are using an IMAP server and want to store your mails on the server, not in the client.

Solution: In KMail, choose Settings → Configure KMail → Identities → (Choose an identity) → Modify → Advanced → Sent-mail folder

Symptom: You want to store mails in a special folder. Maybe you are using an IMAP server and want Trashed mails to be stored on the server, not in the client.

Solution: In KMail, choose Settings → Configure KMail → Accounts → Receiving tab → (Choose an account) → Modify → Advanced → Trash folder

In some versions you will need Settings → Configure KMail → Accounts → Receiving tab → (Choose an account) → Modify → IMAP settings tab → Trash folder (or Wastebin folder, depending on your distro)

Symptom: You exchange encrypted mail with a friend, but would like to store it unencrypted, once you have opened the message.

Solution: To store emails that have been decrypted once in unencrypted format henceforth, add this to your kmailrc configuration file, in the [Reader] section:

store-displayed-messages-unencrypted=true

This may only work with SMIME but implementation for OpenPGP is being worked on.

Symptom: You intend moving on to reading your mail from an IMAP server, and wonder how filtering and spam handling will occur?

Solution: The machine that already has your mail can become your IMAP server. You will need to configure a server application. Dovecot is one such, and the guidance on the project web pages make it easy to set up. That still leaves you with the problem of filtering, as it makes sense to do it on the server (when you point KMail at the server you will see the folders that you have created on the server). Again there are options, but one of the best known is procmail. Again there is plenty of information on the Internet on how to set this up. You give it a set of “recipes” - here's an example:

    :0
    * (^To|^CC|^List-ID): .*kde-linux
    ${MAILDIR}.INBOX.KDE-Lists.kde-users/
  

If you have maildir folders, each recipe must end with a “/”. If your folders are mbox, just omit the “/”

If you have been using bogofilter with KMail you will already have a wordlist. This can be used at server level, too, so you will not have to start training from scratch. The trick is to set this before the procmail recipes:

:0fw
 | bogofilter -e -p

0e
 { EXITCODE=75 HOST }

0:
 * ^X-Bogosity: Spam, tests=bogofilter
 ${MAILDIR}.INBOX.a-Spam/

0e
 { EXITCODE=75 HOST }

0:
 * ^X-Bogosity: Unsure, tests=bogofilter
 ${MAILDIR}.INBOX.a-Unsure/

0e
 { EXITCODE=75 HOST }
 

Note that it is going to use a mailbox for spam and one for unsure - I add a 'a-' to the name to ensure that they are easily seen, at the top of the list.

Finally, to improve performance, run the following command occasionally on saved spam and unsures:

/usr/share/bogofilter/contrib/trainbogo.sh -c -H /home/user/Maildir /.INBOX.bogotrain_ham/cur/ -S /home/user/Maildir/.INBOX.bogotrain_spam/cur/

(don't forget to check the path.)

This is not a complete guide to setting up a server, but notes on how to set up the server to work as you expect in KMail.

Symptom: You are using KMail on a netbook, and find that the new Aggregation display leaves you little screen space

Solution:If you want to change the look so that a mail uses a single row instead of two rows, go to View → Message List → Theme and change the theme to Classic. If you want to disable grouping by date, change the aggregation using View → Message List → Aggregation to Standard Mailing List. Now your KMail will look exactly like it did in earlier versions.

In Settings → Configure KMail → Appearance → Fonts you can select Use custom fonts and change the setting for each component in the list. This is when you discover that your folder list and the message bodies do use the fonts you want, but the message list still has too large a font.

You can make the font changes by right-clicking on the Message List headers, and selecting Theme → Configure → Appearance Tab. Each one of those column headers needs to be clicked on, and your new custom font set. At the end of this, the message list will display in the same font as the rest of your layout.

Symptom: You are using KMail on a netbook, and find that the tooltips over folders hide too many folder names

Solution: Right-clicking on the header of the Folder List and unselect Display Tooltips. In the settings dialog you can also select When Text Obscured. When Text Obscured is handy for folders that have long names, so that only a part of the name is displayed. Folders where you can see the full name will not pop up the tooltip.

In KMail, Settings → Configure KMail → Appearance → Message List uncheck General → Display tooltips for messages and group headers

In System Settings → Application Appearance → Colors → Colors, for each color set except Common Colors (which doesn't have it), change the Alternate Background to be the same as the Normal Background.

Mandriva and Mageia doesn't use the name System Settings. As in KControl, the KDE 3 control centre, they name it “Configure your Desktop” to distinguish it from “Configure your Computer”, a.k.a. the Mandriva/Mageia Control Center (MCC). Other than this name change, the method is as described above.

The messages are typically in ~/.kde/share/apps/kmail/. For very old installations of KMail, the messages can also be in ~/Mail. Note that KMail uses hidden sub-directories inside that directory, so you need to make sure to copy hidden directories as well.

For settings you will need to copy the following files:

Your address book is usually stored in ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/. Calendar data is in ~/.kde/share/apps/korganizer

From version 4.4 you may have some Akonadi-controlled entries that also need to be kept. Add to the above list -

If you plan to use an USB stick as transport medium for your data, be sure to read the next section.

Symptom: You are setting up a new computer and want to transfer all your mail. You decide to copy everything to a USB stick. The job starts, then you start to get failure message,

Unable to copy ............Invalid argument

Solution: Your usb stick is (V)FAT formatted, and thus can't handle maildir folder names (nor can it handle permissions, which can cause many other problems). You have two choices. Either format your USB stick as ext2 (in which case you should be aware it can't be read on Windows® OSes without installing additional software there) or create a tar file of all your mail, copy that to the stick and extract it to your new host.

Normal IMAP mode does not support filtering, but the new disconnected IMAP account type does. You could try to use server-side filtering (ask your admin for how to install filters on the server and in which format), since IMAP is all about managing your email on the server. Unfortunately, although there exists a mail filter language (Sieve, defined in RFC3028), there is no standardized access protocol for installing or editing server-side Sieve scripts. If such a protocol becomes available in the future, KMail will most probably include support for it.

KMail accesses PGP/GnuPG synchronously, i.e. it blocks while PGP/GnuPG works. This means that you might want to disable automatic retrieval of unknown keys from a keyserver to make KMail look more responsive. If you are using GnuPG 1.0.7 (or better) or upgraded from an earlier version, then make sure to run gpg --rebuild-keydb-caches once and gpg --check-trustdb after every import or refresh. Both will speed up GnuPG immensely.

KMail provides a simple and easy-to-use interface for the basic functions of these programs; still you should understand how these programs work and what might make their use insecure. Some important issues:

Most KMail settings are stored in $KDEHOME/share/config/kmailrc, where $KDEHOME is typically ~/.kde. From version 4.4 Akonadi-controlled entries are stored in the following folders and files:

Note that some of the files are hidden: remember to also copy those if you want to backup or archive your mails.

KMail regenerates the index of a folder whenever the index appears to be out of date, i.e. whenever the contents of a folder are newer than the index. KMail regenerates the index in this case in order to prevent the loss or corruption of messages. Unfortunately, currently-deleted messages might reappear and message flags (like important, etc.) might be lost when the index is regenerated.

An outdated index can have several causes; the two most important causes are:

Symptom: You want to start KMail from a minimal desktop environment like fvwm2. It does not start.

Reason: You are missing the dbus functionality.

Solution: Start KMail using dbus-launch like this:

dbus-launch kmail

If you're using the mbox format for your folders it is not possible to use a different email client while KMail is running. With mutt there may also be problems even if both programs are not running at the same time. We recommend to use the maildir format in this case, this should solve all problems.

There is no automatic way to do that. You will have to create a new folder in maildir format and copy the messages from the mbox folder into this new folder. Remember to adapt any filter rules connected with the old folder before you delete it.

This is currently not supported. As a workaround, move the message to the drafts folder, double click on it in order to open it in the composer, remove the attachments, save the message again to the drafts folder, move it back to its folder. The disadvantage of this workaround is that the date will be changed to the current date. Some other headers might also be changed.

If KMail should always check for new messages at startup then enable Check mail on startup on the Accounts configuration page. Otherwise start KMail with kmail --check.

The welcome screen lists all important changes for your version. It is displayed when you select Help → KMail Introduction.

Exit KMail, make a backup of ~/.kde/share/config/kmailrc, then open it with an editor and add e.g. folders=/home/username/.mail to the “[General]” section. Then move all your existing folders (including the hidden index files) to the new location. The next time you start KMail will use /home/username/.mail instead of /home/username/.kde/share/apps/kmail. Note that KMail will lose its filters if you change the mail folder's location but forget to move your existing folders.

To add a whole mbox mail folder use ln -s /somewhere/Mail/.remotedir.directory /home/username/share/apps/kmail/.mymailboxfile.directory. Note that it is not possible to use links to files, only links that point to folders will work.

Sure. Just select a short relevant part of the original mail with the mouse before you reply. Only this part will then be quoted in your reply.

Probably the “Date:” header of these messages is broken and KMail cannot interpret it. That is not a bug in KMail but in the software that sent the mail.

Separating the signature from the message body with two dashes and a space on a single line is common usage. These symbols permit mail clients who recognize them to trim the signatures from a reply. If your signature does not already have this separator, KMail will automatically add it.

This happens if you have enabled Leave fetched messages on the server and your POP3 server does not support the UIDL command. There is currently no workaround besides disabling Leave fetched messages on the server. A more detailed explanation can be found in this mailing list post.

A list of submitted bugs can be obtained by the query from the Bugzilla page. Note that not all these bugs are valid. All in all we think that KMail is a very robust piece of software.

References to external content like images, are disabled by default, as they can be used to track whether and when you read a message. Loading external references can be activated in the Security tab in KMail's configuration dialog; also Plugins (like Adobe® Flash), Java™ and JavaScript will not be displayed in KMail for security reasons and there is no way to activate them.

You can only run one instance of KMail at a time. We also recommend to stick to a certain version and not switch back and forth between different versions. Downgrading to an older version will probably cause problems, e.g. because the index file formats might have changed. Upgrading should never be a problem.

Uuencoded attachments are supported, but inline uuencoded files are not.

KMail tries to save your mail to ~/.kde4/share/apps/kmail/autosave in case of a crash. The next time you start KMail the mail composer should appear with your mail again; If it does not, try to open the files in ~/.kde4/share/apps/kmail/autosave with an editor. If there are no files in this folder then the crash was so bad that KMail could not save your mail.

Associating a folder with a mailing list has nothing to do with filtering the mailing list messages — you have to add a new filter rule manually; however, once you associated a folder with a mailing list you can use Message → Reply to Mailing-List... or Message → New Message to Mailing-List... and the mailing list address will be set in the To: field.

There are two common techniques used for SMTP authentication: “SMTP after POP3” and “SMTP Auth”. “SMTP Auth” can be set in the General tab of the SMTP configuration dialog. To use “SMTP after POP3” you have to collect all your messages in the outbox and send them just after you have fetched new mail. You can make KMail send the queued messages automatically with the Send messages in outbox folder option on the Accounts configuration page.

Yes, but it is important to do it the right way or you might lose mail. In order to use procmail and KMail you need to set up KMail so that it will fetch new mail from the spoolfiles in which procmail drops your mail. Do not set up procmail to deliver mail in a KMail folder, this cannot work.

For each procmail spoolfile you then need to create an account from which KMail will fetch new mail; you also need to make sure you specify the right lockfile name for this account. When setting up an account, KMail will do some minimal parsing on your .procmail file, and will try to list every spoolfile it has found, and also the lockfiles next to the procmail lockfile item. procmail lets the user specify lockfiles in three different ways, so there is no way to establish a correspondence between the spoolfiles and lockfiles; so it's really up to you to make sure you specify the right lockfile for each spoolfile.

Before you can use spellchecking the first time, you have to configure it. You can do so in the composer window's menu under Settings → Spellchecker.... You can set the dictionary and the encoding there.

See the section Using other Mailbox files with KMail.

If your POP3 server runs an ssh daemon, you can use ssh to tunnel your POP3 connection using the following command:

ssh -L 11000:127.0.0.1:110 user@host

Modify your KMail configuration to fetch the mail via POP3 from localhost and ssh will tunnel the connection for you.

KMail does not lock the files in ~/Mail.

To avoid the risk of losing mail if using a local account it is necessary to ensure that KMail uses the same type of locking as your mail delivery agent.

There are five different locking options you can use:

Procmail lockfile will use a small utility that comes with procmail called lockfile. You can use this if your mail folder is in a folder where you have write permission. This will not work on your /var/spool/mail/user file in most cases. It will create .lock files on your account when KMail is checking for new mail. Please note that this will only work if procmail is installed on your system.

Mutt dotlock and Mutt dotlock privileged will both use a small utility that comes with mutt called mutt_dotlock. Mutt dotlock can be used in the same way as the Procmail lockfile option, with the same limitation with regards to the /var/spool/mail/ folders. However, the Mutt dotlock privileged option can create lock files in the /var/spool/mail folder. mutt_dotlock is a setgid program and this option will run it in setgid mode. Please note that these options will only work if mutt is installed on your system.

FCNTL will use the fcntl() system call.

If you do not want to use any locking, the none option is what you want. However, there are risks of losing mail when no locking is used.

If you want to leave all messages on the server: open up the Settings → Configure KMail... window. Click on the Accounts page. Select your account from the account list and click the Modify... button. This dialog contains the Leave fetched messages on the server setting which you must enable.

The text footer is also called a signature (not to be confused with a cryptographic signature). Select Settings → Configure KMail.... Look in the Identity page for the Signature tab and add your signature there. Then go to the General tab on the Composer page and enable Automatically insert signature

First you should check if your distribution can do this for you. It probably has already been set up during installation.

If that is not the case, you may want to have a look at the Mail Queue HOWTO.

You can get a list of functions by using this command in a shell: qdbus org.kde.kmail /KMail. Then you can control KMail like this: qdbus org.kde.kmail /KMail org.kde.kmail.kmail.folderList. You can use qdbusviewer to browse available methods in a graphical interface.

This can happen when the message contains two dashes and a space on a single line. This is seen as the start of the signature. The remaining part of the message will not be quoted, because when you reply to a message KMail strips the signature.

No, you cannot get rid of them. The local folders function as a fallback when the IMAP server is unreachable. Although you only use IMAP, KMail uses the outbox for sending the messages. If we hide all local folders you will not be able to fix messages in the outbox which cannot be send for some reason. But it is possible to keep the local folders collapsed. What you have to do is go to Settings → Configure KMail... and go to the section Misc, there you can setup the folder on startup. If you change that to a folder on the IMAP account, the Local Folders will stay collapsed when KMail starts.

If you want to follow a thread, right click and choose Mark Thread → Watch Thread.

From this point on all messages on the thread that starts in this message will be marked as Watched.

This is useful in case you are registered to a mailing list such as kdepim-users@kde.org and want to filter out the threads you participate in.

Symptom: you receive mail messages in different languages and want to translate them without doing lots of copy and paste.

Solution: using an external program to translate our E-Mail and display it.

Step by step implementation

If the output file 2.mbox is not the same as 1.mbox then there is a problem in the script and it should not be used.