Following Kévin it’s my turn to show you what happened around Kontact in the previous two months. More than 30 people contributed about 1200 changes in that time, we had a new major release in early December and there’s a virtual New Year meetup on Saturday!

Virtual New Year Meetup

Cornelius is organizing an online KDE PIM Meetup next Saturday, starting at 14:00 CET, themed in the 15+ year old tradition of the new year sprints at the Intevation office in Osnabrück, where much of what we have in Kontact today got started. Past, present and future PIM contributors should follow the wiki page for the meeting details :)

Kontact

There has been a renewed effort to push Kontact on Windows forward, resulting in various fixes throughout the entire stack by Dan, Hannah, Laurent and others.

Screenshot of KDE Kontact running on Windows 10.
Kontact running on Windows.

To improve the experience on Windows, there is an ongoing effort to move password storage from using KWallet directly to handling that via QtKeychain. This will use the corresponding platform infrastructure for credential storage (which on Linux, FreeBSD, etc of course still is KWallet).

Improving forward compatibility with the upcoming Qt6 and KF6 transition also remained an important topic all over the place.

KMail

  • Work on adding Autocrypt continued.
  • Protected headers are now signed and encrypted when possible.
  • Fixed a crash when sending encrypt only emails (bug 426432).
  • Do not break signature, when recipients of an mail have non ASCII names (bug 427091).
  • Improved calendar selection when creating an event from an email (bug 429546).
  • Fix CSS from HTML emails messing up the button layout of the itinerary plug-in.
  • Fix auto-correction wrongly removing French apostrophes (bug 430345).
  • Fix crash under certain SMTP login failure conditions (bug 421930).
  • Fix empty return-path headers breaking DKIM signatures (bug 429224).
  • Improved PDF printing support (bug 422095).

KOrganizer

  • Improve consistency of event and task (context) menu actions.
  • Fix display of recurrences with a detached main incidence in the agenda view.
  • Fix display of multi-day events from non-local time zones (bug 429007).
  • Fix off-by-one error in yearly recurrence rule pull-down.
  • Prevent running executables attached to incidences.
  • Fix incidence attachment mimetype detection (bug 407871).
  • Display a warning for invalid recurrence end-on dates.
  • Properly handle Google tasks as all-day tasks.
  • Update Japanese holidays definition, and improve the performance of looking up holiday definitions.
  • Fix a crash in the Google groupware resource.

Kleopatra

  • Improved interchangeability of smartcards, allowing the use of the same card for both S/MIME and OpenPGP, and to generate/transfer keys for both. This is particularly useful for organization that give their users an ID card. Generally those were not usable for email encryption with OpenPGP until now. GnuPG supporting more and more such ID cards further increases the use of this.
  • Kleopatra now also properly supports multiple smartcards at the same time.
  • It is now possible to revoke OpenPGP certifications using Kleopatra.
  • On Windows Unicode home directories are now supported and directories containing Unicode file names can be encrypted.

KAddressBook

  • Improve address adding workflow (bug 430119).

Help to make Kontact even better!

Take a look at some of the junior jobs that we have! They are simple, mostly programming tasks that don’t require any deep knowledge or understanding of Kontact, so anyone can work on them. Feel free to pick any task from the list and reach out to us! We’ll be happy to guide you and answer all your questions. Read more here…