This weekend, I attended the KDE PIM 2025 Sprint (AKA meeting) in Paris.
First, what does PIM mean? Personal information management.
Second, what does Personal information management mean? It's the software for managing email, calendar, address book, etc.
Third, this is going to be long, so let me thank https://haute-couture.enioka.com/en/ for hosting us (their office is in Rue du Mail which seems very fitting for a meeting improving e-mail software) and thanks to KDE e.V. for sponsoring travel and hotel for the meeting. If you can, please donate so that more meetings like this can happen.
This was my first time attending a PIM sprint even though I have been a KDE developer for a long time and a KMail/KOrganizer user for possibly even longer.
It is true that these softwares are not in the most polished state, but honestly I would not know how to handle my email without KMail.
Anyhow here's a list of things I did:
We talked a bit about bugs handling and it turns out not a lot of people are having a look at bugs, so I volunteered to watch the pim-bugs-null@kde.org address in Bugzilla (where most/all related bugs are assigned to) so I can help a bit. Note that I only committed to quickly read over them to try to make sure "really bad things" don't get overlooked. "Normal" bugs will always exist in every software and those will be fixed when they are fixed :)
If you also want to help you can set yourself to watch that pim-bugs-null@kde.org address in https://bugs.kde.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email.
On the topic of bugs, I managed to fix "left-click does not work on links with target="_blank" in HTML e-mails" with an impressive 1-liner change. It should be available with KDE Gear 25.12.1.
On Friday night, I experienced "sending emails does not work". After a few hours of debugging and thanks to our sysadmins, we found out it was due to "Your SMTP configuration was wrong". It seems older KMail versions were a bit more gracious when your configuration was wrong, but now it fails (fair enoug, although ideally it could give a better error). Incidentally I was not the only one with this problem since a few hours later we got this bug https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513284 that was basically the same. (My watching of pim-bugs-null@kde.org was already fruitful!)
On Saturday morning, I continued scratching my own itch and fixed a rather obscure bug where some context menu actions when right clicking on emails in KMail were not properly updated when expanding/collapsing threads.
KMime is undergoing API modernization and is slated to become a KDE Framework soon (TM). I helped a bit adapting code that uses KMime to the new API.
On Sunday, I worked a bit on polishing address suggestion blacklisting on KMail (i.e. when I search for Foo, I don't want to get a suggestion to send an email to their old employer's email address). You can do that right now by right clicking on the "To" text field and selecting Completion Configuration and then going to the third tab. But that is a bit cumbersome (to the degree I had no idea that feature existed until the very same day). To make it a bit easier to discover, i have proposed adding a right click menu on the suggestions themselves that let's you blacklist that particular email address.
And now, a short list of things we did: (many more were done and will be explained in detail by other folks)
- Talk about switching the default backend to SQLite instead of
mysqlMariaDB. In general dropping servers (MariaDB/postgres) support would help making the code more maintainable. There are some people using it without problems, but Nico volunteered to do a test run during the sprint and he ended up with some problems, so there's still some things to debug there. - Talk about doing a survey/adding more KUserFeedback data. We kind of agreed that first we need to know what question we really want to know the answer to and what would be the consequences of a given answer before spending time in designing a survey. But anyway if you use the KDE PIM software, please enable User Feedback in the settings, we promise we won't spy on you.
- New online accounts system. It should replace the not very useful accounts system that we now have (that also has a quite complicated dependency chain). It showed quite some promise in making things much more user friendly.
All in all it was a very productive meeting and I am happy to have attended.
On a closing note, one day we will have to speak about potentially sponsoring food for sprint attendees. We got travel and hotel sponsored, but I spent around 100 € on breakfast/lunch/dinner for that sprint (not going to any fancy place at all). Yes, I can spare that amount of money, but maybe some others in the community can not, and for sure we want them to also attend. One could even argue that having to spend money on top of spending a weekend and 2 work-holidays for the travel is a bit too much, it won't be me because I ❤️ KDE but someone could argue it 😁
