KMail Mailing List

[Timothy Murphy]

Anne Wilson wrote:

>> I should say that what I really want to do
>> is set up my own mailing list,
>> ie a list of email addresses
>> and a facility to send email to a "virtual address", say "MyFriends",
>> which will result in the message being sent
>> to the people on the list.
> 
>> Is that possible with the current PIM/KMail/KAddressBook?
>> 
> Maybe.  KAddressBook now uses Groups instead of Mailing Lists.  Over the
> last
> couple of years I've had some success with this, but it is patchy. 
> Sometimes
> the group name remains but some addresses are lost.  This is in KMail 1. 
> I hope to have KMail 2 installed this weekend, so I'll test then and let
> you know what I find.

Did you get round to this?
I'd be very interested to know if it is possible.

I think I must be misunderstanding something,
as surely many people want to send email frequently
to a group of say 10-20 people,
and don't want to list all the addresses each time?
(My wife seems to have no difficulty doing this with Outlook!)

Can this be done in some way with aliases in sendmail,
or something like that?

Though in my case, I'd rather keep the list on my server.
I do keep an OpenLDAP contact list on my server,
and have seen suggestions that one can set up a mailing list with this,
though I haven't seen any concrete description of what to do.

Also the link between KAddressBook and OpenLDAP is rather hazy,
in my experience, eg OpenLDAP contacts come up in KMail,
but not in KAddressBook.

According to "kmail -v" I'm running KMail: 1.13.7 .
How will you go up to KMail 2?
Do you compile it separately, or are you updating kdepim?

>> It used to be possible with KAddressBook, but seems to have disappeared.
>> This is rather difficult to discover, as KAddressBook
>> has not had an official Handbook for many years,
>> despite their being a pointer to it.
>> 
> Search for KAddressBook in UserBase - that's where the most recent
> documentation is.

I did look at the documentation there,
but it did not seem to answer my query.
I assume you are responsible for this documentation,
in which case I'd like to thank you,
as I have found UserBase helpful in several cases.

But I take it this is a substitute for a proper Handbook
from the KAddressBook developer or developers?

>> Am I alone in wishing that the PIM developers in particular,
>> and KDE developers in general,
>> would stop thinking of clever things to do,
>> and document properly what is available now?
> 
> How would you feel if someone told you what you must do in your spare
> time?

I think that is a very dangerous argument.
It's only a small step from there to "Linux is rubbish,
because it is written by people in their spare time"

In my limited experience, opensource software is at least as good in general
as its commercial counterparts.
And I think it should be judged by the same standards.

In this case, I think it should be a requirement that anyone offering
KDE or Fedora software should provide minimal documentation with it.
That does not seem a very onerous request to me.
I also think documenting a program is good for a developer,
as it clarifies the logic of the program.


-- 
Timothy Murphy  
e-mail: gayleard /at/ eircom.net
tel: +353-86-2336090, +353-1-2842366
s-mail: School of Mathematics, Trinity College, Dublin 2, Ireland