KDE and Gnome Email Clients (4) Configuring K Mail
Dateline 08/16/99
K Mail offers quite a lot of configuration options. Find out what they are, where they are and what they mean.
"Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the darksome hours
Weeping, and watching for the morrow,--
He knows ye not, ye gloomy Powers."
Goethe
Wilhelm Meister
Settings
We have already installed K Mail and done the basic setup. Now let's have another look at the settings. You can reach the dialog via "File | Settings...".
Identity
The first Tab is called "Identity". Here, we define our Name, Organization, and email address. Optionally, if you want replies to your message to go to an address different from the one you entered above, you can set a Reply-To address. The signature file will usually be "~/.signature", the file almost all Unix email clients use to get the signature from.
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Network
The "Network" settings conclude one or more POP email accounts and a way to send mail.
To do so, you can either use sendmail or your ISP's mail server. The latter is probably what you know from Windows or the Mac: you define a SMTP server (for example "smtp.about.com") and its port (you can be almost sure it is 25).
Most Linux distributions will install sendmail (or something equivalent) as a local mail server by default. It works exactly the way the SMTP server at your ISP does, except that you can (must...) set it up yourself (I configured mine to send all mail to my ISP's mail server ;). You do not need to connect to the mail server on your computer via the Internet but feed it with messages directly. This is what the "Sendmail" option of "Sending Mail" is for. If you have not configured sendmail, use "SMTP".
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For incoming mail, you can set up one or more POP accounts. To add an account, click (surprise!) "Add...". K Mail asks for an "Account Type": When we installed K Mail, we added a POP account; this is also what you will usually do. A "Local Mailbox" is used to transfer mail from a special spool file to your home directory. The spool file would be fed with incoming messages by your local mail server (sendmail). It is also possible to fetch mail from a POP server and have it spooled in this file, but using K Mail, this is an unnecessary step as we can access POP servers directly.
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Appearance
Here, we can set the fonts of message list (the list of messages in a mailbox appears in the top-right pane of K Mail) and message bodies. Support for this feature appears a bit wobbly: I'm never sure which of the two, if any, will change if I change one of the fonts. (??)
If you check the "Long folder list", the folder list in the left pane will stretch to the bottom of the K Mail window and take away some of the pane where the message body is displayed.
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Composer
In the first section of this tab, "Phrases", you can define the phrases used if you reply to a message or forward it. The most important of these is probably the "Indentation": it is ">%_" by default and you had better not touch it. It is common usage that quoted text in an email is indented by "> ".
The next section is called "Appearance", probably because of the option to use monospace font; but this is "still broken". More sense makes the option to wrap the message text: Wrap it at anything between 60 and 80 characters, but wrap it. If you select to automatically append your signature, K Mail will take your sig from whatever file you specified above and append it to every outgoing mail you write.
K Mail works with PGP to encrypt and sign message. We shall have a closer look at this. In the "Appearance" section you can define to have all outgoing messages signed with your key by default. This is usually a good idea.
"When sending mail" you may want to change the default sending option to "send later". Then any message you create will not immediately be sent to the mail server (you may be off-line!), but be stored in the "outbox". You can send the messages in the outbox at any time using "File | Send Queued".
If you select to "Allow 8-bit", special characters in your messages like accents will not be encoded in any way but be sent to your mail server as is. In most cases, this should work fine, and you can leave it there. If you have problems, try "MIME Compliant", which will encode the message text as quoted-printable.
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Misc
If you are brave (or reckless) enough, choose to have your trash-can emptied upon exit. Any message you put in the trash during a session will be forever gone.
Above I told you that messages in the outbox can be sent at any time. K Mail can do this for you automatically, too, and send all messages waiting to be sent whenever you check for new mail; a really useful feature.
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PGP
To make K Mail work with PGP, you have to at least specify your user identity. Unfortunately (if you have more than one for different accounts), you can only specify one at a time.
I advise you not to store your pass phrase, leave this unchecked. Encrypting to yourself is a good idea: it makes it possible to read encrypted messages you sent to somebody else.
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