A MozillaQuest Magazine Editor's Choice

KMail -- One of the Best E-Mail Clients

Mike Angelo -- 23 February 2005 (C) -- Page 2

KMail has excellent search and filter features too. You easily can save a completed search in the Searches folder. Please notice at the bottom of the Folders panel in both Figures 1 and 2, on page 1, there is a Searches folder for saving searches.

Figure 4, below, shows the KMail search panel. Please notice, by looking at Figure 4, that you can search every KMail folder or just a particular folder such as your inbox. You also can include subfolders in your search.

The KMail message-search feature lets you look for more than one thing in your search. You can set your search to match all of the search terms or any of the search terms. Moreover, you can search the entire message, <message>, for a search term or a specific part of a message such as the Subject line of the message. Please see Figure 4.

In Figure 4, the KMail search tool is configured to search all KMail folders, including subfolders, for e-mail messages that contain "KMail" in the message Subject and have a <size in bytes> greater than "2000" bytes. When the search is completed, a copy of the search results will be saved in a folder named Last Search -- a subfolder in the KMail Searches folder.

If you want to find a particular text string in a message that you have opened, just use the KMail Find in Message tool.

KMail Message Filtering

KMail also has a powerful message filtering tool. It looks lots like the KMail search tool.

However, instead of providing a list of messages that match the search terms you specify, the KMail Filter tool let's you apply filter rules (sort of like search terms) to invoke Filter Actions. The Filter Actions let you do things such as move messages that meet the filter rules to a particular folder, mark messages as read, mark messages as important, forward messages, and so forth.

For example, let's say that you are on a mailing list about Linux. You could set up a filter to put all your incoming e-mail from the Linux mailing list into a folder named Linux_IN. You also could set up another filter to place all your e-mail to the Linux mailing list in a folder named Linux_Sent.

Doing so means that you no longer have to search through lots of e-mail to find your Linux mailing-list e-mail. Simply go to your Linux_IN or Linux_Sent folder and there you are. All your Linux mailing-list e-mail is right there in one place.

For a more complete list of KMail features, please see the links in the Resources section at the end of this article.

Overall Evaluation of KDE KMail

All in all, KMail is a powerful and excellent e-mail client. It's chock full of neat and handy features. And it just keeps getting better and better with each new release. We believe it is one of the best e-mail clients available today. Moreover, KDE's KMail e-mail client is free and open source software. Therefore, we have decided to give KDE's, KMail, e-mail client, version 1.7.1, a MozillaQuest Magazine Editor's Choice Award.

KMail comes with most GNU-Linux distributions as part of the KDE group of packages. So, if you are a Linux user and already have KMail installed, give it a try if you already have not done so.

If KMail 1.7.1 did not come with your Linux distribution, download it and give it a try -- it's free.

If you are a Microsoft Windows user, you are out of luck for now. KMail is not for the MS Windows operating system -- at this time.

However, in an e-mail discussion about the KDE Konqueror Web browser and file manager with KDE developer George Staikos, he mentioned that KDE's Konqueror for Windows is presently a "work in progress". There are people actively working on porting KDE libraries to Windows, and once that's done, porting Konqueror will certainly be a popular project.

The same thing goes for KMail too. In our e-mail discussion with KMail maintainer Ingo Klöcker we asked:

Are there any plans to port KMail to MS Windows?

Ingo replied:

There are no particular plans, but due to the KDE on Cygwin project . . . it's already possible today to run KMail 1.5 on MS Windows (albeit using Cygwin, the POSIX emulation layer for Windows, and the Cygwin XFree86 server). Moreover, since Trolltech has announced that Qt 4 for Windows will be available under the open source GPL license, porting KMail to MS Windows will be inevitable.

In the meantime, if you are a Microsoft Windows user you can download GNU-Linux at no charge and install Linux on your PC. We highly recommend that you do that. Please see our article Gaël Duval Tells Why Mandrake Linux Is Better Than MS Windows.

If you like, you can have both MS Windows and GNU-Linux running on the same computer. Please see our article Dual-Boot Linux & Windows to Get the Best of Both Operating System Worlds for more information about dual booting Linux and MS Windows.

KDE KMail Earns a MozillaQuest Magazine Editor's Choice Award

Because the KDE KMail e-mail client is free, feature rich, works well, and works well with Linux, it provides a particularly notable bang for the buck. KMail is an effective tool for reducing and often eliminating e-mail annoyances, privacy invasions, and security exposures. It is good enough to be the e-mail client that we use. Thus, the KDE KMail e-mail client gets a MozillaQuest Magazine Editor's Choice Award.

Resources

KMail and Kontact

KMail - the KDE mail client

KMail - Features

KMail - Tools & Docs

(Mail Import - Mail Export - Addressbook Import - Development & Security - Anti-Spam - Other Tools & Patches)

KMail - Screenshots

Getting and Downloading KDE

KDE Kontact

KMail Chat and Help

irc://irc.axminister.net/KMail

irc://irc.efnet.net/KMail

KDE

KDE 3.2.3 to KDE 3.3.0 Changelog

KDE Web Site

KDE on Cygwin project

• Security

IRC Security

Home Computer Security, CERT Coordination Center, Software Engineering Institute

• Misc.

Comparing Two Approaches to Remote Mailbox Access: IMAP vs. POP

Message Access Paradigms and Protocols

• Linux Distributions

Mandrake Linux 10.1 Official - 2.6 Linux kernel

Pogo Linux Altura64 Workstation Is a MozillaQuest Magazine Editor's Choice

SanDisk Digital Audio Players for Linux, Mac, and Windows Make Nice Gifts (Editor's Choice)

The Mettle of Pogo Linux: Mike Angelo discusses Pogo Linux Computers with CEO Tim Lee and Pogo Linux Engineer Jesse Keating

Mozilla 1.3b Browser-Suite Released

Mozilla 1.0 updated!

Netscape 7.02 Browser-Suite Released

Mozilla and Netscape JavaScript Bugs Compromise Privacy and Security

Is Netscape Losing the Browser Wars?

Linux for Microsoft Windows Users: #4-- Getting Started Using the Windows-Like Desktop for Linux

Linux for Microsoft Windows Users: #2 - Getting Started with The Linux MS Windows-Like Desktop

Linux for Microsoft Windows Users: Introduction & Overview