I have yet to understand why you can’t just export the settings from a working kernel that manages to boot your system and simply use those to recompile a kernel in a chrooted environment but I suspect Google is probably my friend when it comes to situations like this…

Keep up the informed posts, Spadge, it’s a tonic for the troops!

1) Must be secure. Email is private, and this needs to be built in from the start. No defaulting to non-SSL/TLS.
Accounts have SSL/TLS as standard, identities have PGP built in.

2) Must support IMAP.
Yes.

3) Must tell me as soon as possible when I have new email.
Yes, in a number of different ways, and ties in to KDE’s notification thingumy and the message indicator and has its own thing – all configurable.

4) Must allow me to read mail in any folder.
Yes. I think. It’s proper IMAP.

5) Must allow me to send email, including replies and forwarding.
Yes.

6) Must give me access to attachments.
I think you have to DL them and stuff.

7) Must save all my sent messages.
It has local folders for saving drafts, sent, outgoing, deleted. But not for your email, although there is an offline mode (whatever that’s for – I’ve heard of offline but I wouldn’t want to visit).

Must keep track of people I know and their email addresses.
Yes. Integrates with Kontacts.

9) Should allow me to view email sent in HTML.
Yes. Configurable with a little html on/off button

10) Should show inline images.
Erm, send me one and I will tell you.

11) Should allow me to turn off bits I don’t want. Notes? Don’t use them. Todos? Nope.
It’s an email client. It just does email. Other stuff happens elsewhere in KDE.

12) Nice if it has calendar support (or even better – integration)
Kmail does not, but it integrates with KOrganiser which does. I think. I don’t know, I don’t use it.

13) Nice if it can show attachments of various types.
I rather suspect it doesn’t, you know.

I first came across KMail that one time my Windows PC blew up and I used my FreeBSD4 (.10? That tells you when it was I guess) server as a desktop while I was waiting for replacement parts. Took me a day or more just to compile KDE on a Celeron 400 but hey, that’s what you do it for, right?

After I got my Windows computer fixed I couldn’t then go back to Eudora, and I think that’s when Thunderbird took over. Eudora had switched me off of Forte Agent. One of my happiest joys of running kubuntu as my regular desktop was getting KMail back.

It does that thing that mail.app on the iPhone does and that outlook doesn’t: select a block of text, hit reply and it only quotes the selected text. It’s like my favourite non-required feature.