MEPIS Community Forum

This seemed like a really stupid question - how do I create, start or get to the address book in KMail?

But I Googled for it and it seems to be a common problem. However, all the "answers" I found said "It's Akondi's fault, use Thunderbird instead" (I am paraphrasing), and then the discussion would go off at a tangent discussing Thunderbird problems.

So how do you enable the KMail address book? I don't want to go to Thunderbird right now. I have a fresh install of Mepis 11.0 with KDE 4.5.3 and KMail 1.13.5. I have set up KMail and it is otherwise OK, and I can send and receive mail.

However, the "Tools - Address Book" item on my menu is greyed out. In a received email I can right click on the sender's address and select "Add to Address Book" but it then asks me to select an address book (do people have more than one?) from a blank list. If I create a new email I can ask it to send to an address from a "Default Address Book" but what would be (I guess) a list of addresses is just blank and I cannot type one into that list either. [I could also choose from a list of "Recent Addresses" which does work]

This is very frustrating. Did the authors of KMail never test the Address Book function? It works in an earlier installation I have on another PC.

This may help: http://userbase.kde.org/KAddressBook/index

Thanks for that. From it I gather that the addressbook, "kaddressbook", is a separate app that kmail links to in some way. I installed kaddressbook (it was not there by default in the Mepis installation) and its menu item in kmail was no longer greyed out, and it also appeared in the Start Menu (under Office, not KMail).

So far so good. I opened it (not sure by which way, maybe from the Start Menu), created a new address book called <Name>. and put in a couple of addresses. Then I tried composing an email and chosing a recipient from the "Select Recipient" button in Composer - but all I got was a choice of "Default Address Book", which was blank, "Recent Addresses" which did have ones I'd sent to, and a couple of other options also blank. No sign of my <Name> Address Book!

Then I tried re-opening kaddressbook from the Start Menu and then from the kmail menu, and it no longer worked (spinner on the Panel until it gave up)!

I notice there is now a directory ~/.kde/share/apps/kabc/stdvcf/ which has an address I added, but I guess kmail does not find this directory, looking elsewhere? There are also files in ~/.local/share/contacts/ which seem to be my recently used addresses.

Opening the Akonadi console shows a list of databases(?) which includes several possible candidates as to where my address book is, so I am not sure what to do with that.

I read that kaddressbook is a "work in progress", but what a mess! I just want a simple address book. It is matters like this that gave kmail a very bad review in Linux Format magazine recently.

I agree it is klunky. I use it for personal mail, but not for professional mail since I want to sync with Google Contacts (which I use on my Android phone), and Thunderbird makes that much easier (> Manual).
You have to open Contacts and identify which resource to use--make sure it points to the file you started. Then log out and back in.
In

This is not what you want to hear, Nuke, but I had a serious look at switching from Thunderbird to KMail a while ago. Two aspects made me give up after a month of hard work - one was KMail's poor handling of HTML emails, but the clincher was the Address Book.

I have about 20 mailing lists in 4 separate address books, and I found this difficult in KAddressBook. I need to update the address book from within the email application and also separately. With KAddressBook I had exactly the same difficulties you describe. I totally failed in one regular task - a couple of times a year I have to download contact details of about 120 members from a website database and use these to update my email address book, locating each member in the right mailing list category. It's a 2-stage job in Thunderbird and it takes about 10 mins.

Phil

Also worth remembering that there are other good email clients out there. For desktop, I have used Claws mail from the CR in the past and had no trouble with the address book at all. And server-based, Opera's Fastmail is very well done IMHO.

I used kmail for 3-4 years until I got fed up with the address book dropping entries and losing distribution lists if they weren't used for a period of time. It was great in KDE3 but when it switched to KDE4, that's when the address book issues started, and addresses are fundamental to email, so one of the most crucial aspects was simply not functioning as it should.