In this article I will introduce you to Kontact and help you decide if it is ready to usurp your current tool.

Installation

If you are using KDE 4 you will likely have Kontact installed. To find out go click on Start > Applications > Office and see if it is listed. You might also notice that the constituent parts of Kontact are also listed. That is because you can start each component individually and not have to fire up the who shebang. But let’s assume you do want to fire up the whole kit.

Features

Here’s what Kontact includes:

• Summary page: Shows the summary for everything you have upcoming.
• Mail: Your email client.
• Contacts: Your contacts.
• Calendar: Your personal calendar (integrates with the Akonadi server)
• To-do list: Your tasks.
• Feeds: RSS feeds.
• Journal: A personal journal
• Notebook: A simple note taking tool.
• Popup Notes: A reminder tool in the form of popup notes.
• Time tracker: Keep track of your time.

That’s a lot of features compared to your standard groupware suite. But does it measure up? Just about any user (especially users reading Ghacks) can walk themselves through an application like this and figure out just how to  use it. What I want to do is take a look at the KEY components (Mail, Calendar, Contacts, To-do) and see how it stacks up to the competition. Where does it hit, and where does it miss.

Mail

The biggest miss here is a lack of Exchange support. GNOME’s Evolution already has the ability to connect with multiple versions of Exchange. With Kontact I have found various solutions to this problem (most of which involve a shell script-type solution that no new user would want to try), but nothing built in. The only way you can connect to an Exchange server’s email component in Kontact is if the Exchange server has IMAP support turned on.

On the plus side, Kontact’s email cleint (Kmail) does have very nice integrated Anti-SPAM and Anti-Virus tools, each in the form of a simple wizard. You open this by clicking Tools > Anti-Spam Wizard or Tools > Anti-Virus Wizard.

Calendar

Again, the biggest miss here is the lack of Exchange integration. But I have also found Kontact lacking a simple Google calendar plugin.The problem is, This is not to say that Kontact’s calendar application isn’t worth using. It is. If you are looking for a single-user calendar application that doesn’t need to be easily shared, the Kontact Calendar is outstanding. But the minute you need to share that calendar, or add a Google or Exchange calendar, you will soon find the weaknesses of this tool.

The Calendar tool does have some unique features that might appeal to you. In particular are the Time Spent and Timeline views of the calendar. And , when in the Calendar application, you can choose to add new calendars and the list of possible calendars to add looks impressive. You can add from a Kolab server, OpenXchange server, GroupWise Server, local files, and more. But until Kontact has a simple solution for Exchange and Google, it’s missing out.

To dos

There’s not much you can do wrong with a to-do list. It simply a listing of what you need to do. Like most other to-do lists in groupware suites you can take an email and convert it into a task. And you can convert to do items into calendar items.

Verdict

I was hoping to be able to start using Kontact when KDE 4.5 hit the streets. But truth be told, the lack of integration with critical tools leaves Kontact wanting…seriously wanting. Kontact has a long, long way to go before it is ready for anyone in a business environment. A single user? Sure…Kontact is a great tool for you to use. But the minute you need integration you’re most likely going to have to return to Evolution.

Most email clients contain some sort of SPAM prevention. On the Linux operating system you can employ such tools as Bogofilter or Spamassassin. Either of these tools are great for stopping SPAM – but what about using them with your favorite email client? With some Linux email clients you have to add extra applications in order to have one of these SPAM filters doing their job with your client. Some clients, however, have built-in tools to save you a little work. KMail belongs to the latter category. So long as you have either/or Bogofilter or Spamassassin installed, you are one step closer to having solid SPAM filtering.

In this article you will learn how to set up reliable SPAM filtering in the KMail mail client.

Bogofilter and Spamassassin

KMail can use either Bogofilter or Spammassassin easily. Read up on either tool and decide which application you want to use. I have had good luck with both, but I do believe Bogofilter is easier to set up. And since KMail will automatically detect either, the choice is yours.

You can install either tool from within the Add/Remove Software utility by following these steps:

1. Open Add/Remove Software utility.
2. Search for either “bogofilter” or “spamassassin” (No quotes).
3. Select either (or both) tools for installation.
4. Click Apply to install.

That’s it. Now you are ready to move on to KMail.

Kmail SPAM Wizard

Figure 1

When you have KMail set up and running click on the Tools menu and select the “Anti-SPAM Wizard” entry. When the Wizard opens the first thing it will do is detect which SPAM tools you have installed (see Figure 1).

Once the wizard has detected your SPAM tools, select the tool you want to use and click Next. For the purpose of this article I will select Bogofilter.

The next step in the wizard will ask you for two configurations:

• Mark detected SPAM as read: I prefer to unset this, because of the next configuration option.
• Which folder to relocate SPAM: By default KMail will move SPAM to the trash folder. I prefer to create a new SPAM folder in order to catch any false-positives.

By moving SPAM to a specific SPAM folder (and not the trash folder) and keeping SPAM unread, you are less likely to miss any email mistakenly marked as SPAM (false-positive).

The final window of the wizard gives you a report on what you have set up. In my case the wizard creates the following filters:

• Bogofilter Check
• Spam handling
• Classify as Spam
• Classify as NOT Spam

Click the Finish button and your KMail client is ready to learn. And learning is the key.

Help Bogofilter learn

Figure 2

Before Bogofilter can become a reliable SPAM filter, it has to learn what should be classified as SPAM and what should be classified as HAM. Here’s how I like to do it. Allow plenty of email to collect in your inbox. As the mail comes in take all SPAM (that is not already marked and moved) and move it to the SPAM folder. Once you have cleared your Inbox of all SPAM, select all mail in that folder and then click the Ham button (see Figure 2).

Now, once you have collect a good amount of SPAM in your SPAM folder open that folder up, select all the SPAM, and click the SPAM button.

You may have to do this trick a few times before Bogofilter has been properly trained. You will know when Bogofilter has become accurate with your SPAM/HAM.

Final thoughts

It couldn’t be much easier to catch and mark SPAM with KMail and Bogofilter. But if you find Bogofilter not as reliable as you would like, run the Wizard and try Spamassassin instead.