KMail

The KMail Welcome Screen

KMail is the email component of Kontact, the integrated personal information manager from KDE.

Main Features

• Supports the standard mail protocols IMAP, POP3 and SMTP.
• Supports authentication via NTLM (Microsoft Windows) and GSSAPI (Kerberos)
• Supports plain text and secure logins, using SSL and TLS.
• Integration of international character sets
• Spell-checking (as-you-type and on demand)
• Native support for inline OpenPGP, PGP/MIME, and S/MIME.
• Reading and writing of HTML mail.
• Ability to display plain text only from an HTML mail.
• Allows you to receive and accept invitations.
• Integration with popular spam checkers, e.g. SpamAssassin, Bogofilter, etc.
• An optional spam probability meter can be displayed
• Powerful search and filter abilities
• Import Options for many other clients/formats.
• Searching in IMAP folders fully supported
• Highly integrated with other Kontact components
• Encrypted password saving in KWallet
• Several Backup Options

Other Features

• Flagging and tagging of messages to aid sorting and recovery of information
• Supports mailing list management features
• Can replace text smilies with emoticons
• Displays the sender's picture or avatar if present in the address book
• Supports X-Face (b/w pictures in messages)
• Compression of attachments

Groupware

KMail supports Groupware functionality. You can receive invitations from colleagues and accept them. As you accept them, they are entered into your calendar. To view your calendar, start KOrganizer or Kontact.

Screenshots

See this page for several views.

Tutorials

Using KMail

• Getting Started
• Using Kmail General
• Import Options
• Backup Options
• Using Kmail Folders
• Configuring Kmail

KMail's Toolbox

This page discusses the following issues -

• Mail Import Tools
• Mail Export Tools
• Addressbook Import Tools
• Development and Security
• Anti-Spam Tools
• Other Tools and Patches

KMail and encryption

How to encrypt your mail with PGP or S/MIME?

• KMail and PGP/MIME
• KMail and S/MIME

Training courses and external information

• OpenPGP

Download

KMail is available in all major Linux distribution repositories, as tarballs, and soon a Flatpak version will also be available. Ancient versions were compatible with Windows, the Kontact team is looking for help to improve Windows support. For more information look at the Kontact download page.

Installation Instructions

If you need help to install KMail, look at this tutorial about how to install KDE software.

The Development Team

A list of the many developers is available here.

FAQs, Hints and Tips

For ease of reading these have been moved to their own page.

More Information

• KDE official documentation
• Website
• Kde-pim mailing list
• #kontact and #akonadi IRC channels on Freenode