Kontact: Kmail

Straight from KDE 4.2.60 (KDE 4.3 trunk)
However, since it's a very early snapshot, everything here is available on KDE 4.2

Kontact came back with KDE 4.1 (it didn't make it on time for KDE 4.0).

I can't truly comment on how much it improve, since I didn't use Kontact in KDE 3.5.x, however, what I can say is I'm completely amazed by it. It works well, it has a overall good interface (with some, from my point of view, little mistakes here and there).

Kontact is a mix of all PIM KDE applications, this means that they can be launch individually, or seen inside the Kontact suite. I personally think this approach is outstanding, because it's modular, this means anybody can create a KPart for Kontact (Example: Mailody, for those who prefer it over Kmail).

I'll start with KMail, since it's the one I used the most:

By default, the first time you run it, it will open a simple, and easy to follow wizard:

This is how it looks after configuring it:

Quite clean, however, what's a little wrong, is that the window size is too small, and it has previews for mails by default (which, to be fair, should be off by default):

Without the preview pane it looks amazingly better ;-)

Then, just double click to get your email:

Also, the toolbar is showing too many items, which are completely useless there, a better approach will be something like this (from my point of view, application shouldn't have more than 7 toolbar icons, specially if they're doubling each other, as the new-to-do is also included on New dropdown menu):

Before:


After:

You can easily add more accounts (you can use the first time wizard as well, which is easier):

Or set different identities:


You can set custom fonts:


Configure Colors:


Layout:


The message list:


The Message Window:


Add a system tray icon:


And your message tags:


You can also configuring the mail composer:


And security:


And other things:


The search feature works as expected:


And, since it's integrated with Kontact:

I guess this is everything for this week, as you can see KMail is pretty useful, easy to set up (if you use the first run wizard) and, with some tweaks here and there, you can get a impressively clean, uncluttered, yet, useful interface :-)

Next Week: Kontact... contacts XD