Ubuntu® 8.10 Linux® Bible

Chapter 10. Managing E-mail and Personal Information with Kontact

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Configuring e-mail accounts

• Sending and receiving e-mail

• Organizing and filtering e-mail

• Configuring spam and virus detection

• Creating and managing contacts

• Using the calendar

After Web browsers, the program you use to send and receive e-mail is the Internet's killer application. As with Web browsers, there are many different client applications for sending and receiving e-mail, especially in the open source community. GNOME-based Ubuntu systems typically use Evolution, the e-mail application and PIM (Personal Information Manager) suite that was discussed in Chapter 9. KDE-based systems such as Kubuntu provide a personal information management suite called Kontact that is made up of a number of existing and familiar KDE applications.

Kontact provides all of the capabilities that people normally expect from a modern PIM application by combining KMail (the traditional KDE e-mail client), Akregator (an RSS feed aggregator), KAddressBook (a contact management utility), KNode (a Usenet news reader), KNotes (an application for note taking), KOrganizer (a scheduling/calendar application), and KPilot and KitchenSync (Palm handheld synchronization applications) into the single Kontact "meta-application." All of these applications mesh seamlessly thanks to the magic of the KDE KPart framework, which provides both a consistent application development model and a mechanism for developing applications as components that ...