Kontact - KDE Wiki Sandbox

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Kontact is the integrated Personal Information Manager of KDE.

Kontact suite is the powerful KDE PIM solution for KDE. Kontact lets you handle email, agenda, contacts and other 'personal' data together in one place. By separating the PIM back end and the interfaces it has become possible to create Kontact Touch and Kontact Desktop and further interfaces could easily be developed

KDE Kontact consists of the Kontact PIM back end and the graphical applications connecting to the back end. Special 'agents' (say a facebook agent) are employed to get new data in and merge it in the existing data set (for example contacts, news). Due to the clean infrastructure new agents are easy to develop.

Kontact supports various groupware servers. When using these servers your workgroup has access to features like shared email folders, group task lists, calendar sharing, central address books and meeting scheduling.

In short: KDE Kontact delivers innovations to help you manage your communications more easily, organize your work faster and work together more closely, resulting in more productivity and efficiency in digital collaboration.

Components

These programs together form Kontact:

Akregator - Read your favorite feeds
KAddressBook - Manage your contacts
KJots - Your ideas organised in a Notebook
KMail - Mail client
KNode - Your usenet mail reader
KNotes - Sticky notes for your Desktop
KOrganizer - Calendar and scheduling, Journal
KTimeTracker - Track how much time you spend on various tasks
Summary - Summary screen in Kontact

Working with Google Data

Working with GMail - Read your GMail in KMail
Working with Google Calendar - Integrate Google Calendar with KOrganizer.

Working with Google Contacts - Allow Google Contacts to synchronize with Kontact

Where to get help

There is a mailing list at

kdepim-users - for users of the KDE PIM applications (Kontact, KAddressBook, KMail, KOrganizer, KNode, ...) subscribe to kdepim-users archive of kdepim-users. A team of developers and users aim to give answers as quickly as possible

and for urgent help, an IRC channel on Freenode

for users and developers of Kontact - #kontact

Akonadi and KAddressBook

If you have problems concerning Akonadi and the new KAddressBook, there are pages dedicated to these issues

FAQ, Hints and Tips

Migrating your setup to a new distro

In KMail, right click on your Inbox and choose Properties. Go the Maintenance Tab. Have a look at the Location. It has either .kde4 or .kde in the path.

Substitute the appropriate path below.

You need the following config files:

.kde4/share/config/emaildefaults
.kde4/share/config/emailidentities
.kde4/share/config/kmail.eventsrc
.kde4/share/config/kmailrc
.kde4/share/config/kaddressbookrc
.kde4/share/config/kresources/contact
.kde4/share/config/korgacrc
.kde4/share/config/korganizerrc
.kde4/share/config/knotesrc
.kde4/share/config/mailtransports

And the following directories:

.kde4/share/apps/kmail
.kde4/share/apps/kabc
.kde4/share/apps/korganizer
.kde4/share/apps/knotes

If you use Akregator within Kontact, you will also need:

.kde4/share/config/akregator.eventsrc
.kde4/share/config/akregatorrc

And the whole .kde4/share/apps/akregator directory.

Of course the simplest way is just to keep your whole home directory.

Just a word of warning. If the directory naming is different between Desktops or between the two versions of your distro, this will not work as there are references to the directories within the config files. This means that if the files were in a .kde directory, you cannot just put them in a .kde4 directory without editing the references within the config files.

Hiding the Kontact Sidebar

On small screens, you may wish to reclaim the space used by the Kontact sidebar. You can replace it with an (editable) toolbar:

Settings->Toolbars->Navigator [x]
Drag the left panel closed using the splitter between it and the main panel, job done.

Enabling SOCKS support in KMail and KNode

Unlike KDE 3, KDE 4 does not have built-in SOCKS support yet. However, it is still possible and relatively simple to make KMail and KNode use a SOCKS proxy, by using proxychains or other similar tools like tsocks or socksify. Assuming that proxychains is correctly installed and configured, all you need to do is to open a terminal (e.g. Konsole) and type:

proxychains kdeinit4

You don't even need to restart KMail/KNode! (You need to type the above command every time you start a new KDE session though).