Akonadi

Introduction

The Akonadi framework is responsible for providing applications with a centralized database to store, index and retrieve the user's personal information. This includes the user's emails, contacts, calendars, events, journals, alarms, notes, etc.

Currently, all KDE PIM applications with the exception of Akregator are using Akonadi to access user's PIM data.

Controlling Akonadi

Akonadi will start automatically in the background when any application using it is started.

To manually start, stop or restart Akonadi, you can use the akonadictl command from the commandline. Using this method, you can get additional useful information on the console.

To start the Akonadi server,

akonadictl start

To stop the Akonadi server,

akonadictl stop

To restart a running Akonadi server,

akonadictl restart

To query the status of the Akonadi server,

akonadictl status

Disabling the Akonadi subsystem

The Akonadi server is automatically started by any Akonadi-enabled application. If you don't want Akonadi to be started after login, you have to ensure that no Akonadi-enabled application is launched at login or thereafter. Remember to check Plasma applets as well — the Digital Clock widget in the default panel, for instance uses Akonadi to (optionally) display calendar events and this is enabled in its settings by default (see the "Display Events" option) . You must remove any widgets that may start it from your start-up, if you wish Akonadi to start only when you start KMail or other applications.

Remember

If you don't want to have Akonadi running on your system at all, you can not use any of the Akonadi-enabled applications, such as KMail, KOrganizer or KAddressbook. Such applications will not work when Akonadi is disabled using the steps below. Also note, that some Plasma widgets, such as the Digital Clock uses Akonadi.

To ensure that Akonadi is not started, check that no applications require it at login. In particular, open the Plasma clock applet preferences, go to Calendar and uncheck Show events to prevent Plasma from requesting information from Akonadi and thus allowing it to start.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is my data now?

Your data are safely stored outside of Akonadi control on your disk (e.g. local maildir folder or iCal calendar), or on a remote server (in case of e.g. email over IMAP or events from a CalDAV calendar). Akonadi will optionally store a copy of this data in its database to allow applications to quickly retrieve and display them. Any modifications done to data in the Akonadi database will be synced to the actual storage. The main advantage of using the database as a cache is that remote PIM data are available even when you are offline, and you can still interact with them (e.g. mark emails as read or move them, create new events, reschedule existing meetings etc.) and all the changes will get synced automatically once you connect to the internet again.

Thus, deleting the Akonadi database will not cause any data to be lost (as long as all pending changes are synced).

How to upgrade my PostgreSQL database?

After updating your PostgreSQL server to a new major version, sometimes you will have to convert your Akonadi database for use with this new version. Instructions can be found on this page.

Migration problems

Akonadi's Glossary entry has a brief description of Akonadi's purpose, and other useful links. This page explains how Akonadi and KAddressBook work together.