KMail 2 - The Road to Akonadi

Speaker: Thomas McGuire

Akonadi is something most people know only as a buzzword. But what is Akonadi and what does it mean to KMail? When will KMail be ported to it, and what advantages does it bring?

The main topics I'll explore in this talk will be:

1. The history of KMail and the birth of Akonadi 2. The Akonadi porting of KMail 3. The future: KMail 2 - release plans and visions

1. KMail was created over 12 years ago, in a time where sendmail, procmail and fetchmail were still popular. It had no IMAP, which was added later as an afterthought. Even later, support for groupware over IMAP, like Kolab or Scalix was added. These bolted-on features began to show the limits of the design of the current KMail storage layer. This was not unnoticed by the PIM gurus, who thought hard about a new design and came up with Akonadi. I'll give a brief overview of Akonadi and compare it to the old KMail architecture, and explain some of the advantages Akonadi will bring and which problems it will solve.

2. Here I'll examine how we approach porting in KMail. The modular architecture of Akonadi makes it easy to port many parts independently of KMail. This makes it possible to have a working and maintained KMail available, while in parallel creating the complete Akonadi infrastructure. Some of the Akonadi infrastructure is already in place, like IMAP or OpenChange support, and some is currently developed, like POP3 support or a filtering framework. I'll explain how the old storage layer of KMail will be dumped and what parts remain in KMail that need porting.

3. When will all those Akonadi goodies finally arrive in KMail and be available to the end user? Here I'll give an overview of our release schedule and how we plan to release it. Then I'll explore a bit what might happen in the future, after the KMail 2 release. Things could include improved Nepomuk support, additional Akonadi resources for webmail and much more.