Since the last report two month ago we saw the 20.12.2 release of Kontact, had a virtual New Year meetup, and integrate more than 1600 changes by more than 30 contributors. Here are some of the highlights.

New Year Meetup

We started the year with continuing the 15+ year old tradition of the KDE PIM New Year meeting bringing together past, present and future PIM contributors, even if all virtual this time. See Cornelius’ extensive report for details.

Group photo of the virtual KDE PIM meetup.
KDE PIM New Year Meetup group photo.

Kontact

The bulk of the changes again focus on preparing the upcoming migration to Qt6 and KF6. This mainly consists of porting away from deprecated functionality in Qt, KDE Frameworks or the build system, towards the respective future-proof alternatives.

This should pay off down the line in a much smoother transition.

KMail

  • Autocrypt support has been merged and is available as a technical preview. See Sandro’s blog post for how to enable this and a short demo video.
  • You now have more control about downloading specific external content when viewing images (bug 430678). Downloading external content is something you usually want to have disabled, but when dealing with applications that don’t work otherwise, it can now be enabled permanently on a per-domain basis.
  • Correctly handle references to external fonts even with external reference loading is disabled (bug 431218).
  • Contact-specific crypto preferences are available again.
  • Fixed searching for contacts containing underscores (bug 370385).
  • SMTP passwords are loaded from KWallet in all cases again.
  • KMail tabs can now be locked to a specific folder selection.
  • Fix crash when trying to forward a group of emails (bug 431153).
  • Fix canceling of drag’n drop operations (bug 432307).
  • Fix folder context menu positioning on Wayland (bug 430787).

KOrganizer

  • Deleting the last tag of a calendar item no longer causes an error (bug 431297).
  • The layout of overlapping calendar items is improved (bug 64603).
  • Calendar items that end at the end of the day are now displayed on the correct days in the Agenda and Month views.
  • Calendar items that end at the end of the day are now displayed on the correct days in the Agenda and Month views (bug 165212).
  • The item viewer now shows the most recently selected occurrence of a recurring item if several occurrences are selected in turn.
  • Correctly handle changes to start dates of recurring to-dos (bug 430651).

Kleopatra

After finishing the improvements for smartcard support, work on improving the usability of file encryption for large groups of people has started. As a first step, filtering of keys by tags has been enabled in the encryption recipient selection. Those tags are currently used to associate keys with groups of people. Then work on adding proper support for groups of keys to Kleopatra has started. Just as tags those groups can be used for encrypting text and files to groups of people. Group support is still experimental.

Akregator

  • Fix HTML article default size (bug 397752).
  • Fix tray icon visibility (bug 420520).

KAddressBook

  • Allow deleting of address entries in the contact editor.
  • There’s a proposal for a new API around lookup and localization of country and country subdivision information that would replace/augment existing KContacts API.

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…