KDE Announces 4.9 Beta1 and Testing Initiative

It does not have all the shortcuts and time-saving mini-features that KMail1 had and the disconnected IMAP support is IMHO still flaky when compared to KMail1, but all the distributions I use make it hard/impossible to still use KMail1 today. KMail2 never became stable for me (6GB synchronized IMAP tree with too many folders) - and I have been trying for nearly 2 years.

Along with KMail, I also moved away from other software, such as Kolab on the server (I now rely on CalDAV/CardDAV for synchronizing) or other KDE applications such as Kopete. If KMail2 really became stable again at some point in the near future, I might give it a last chance (and with it, the whole KDE4 eco-system). However, given the past 3 years, I seriously doubt it.

All in all, it is a really sad state of affair, as KMail1 used to be near-perfect for my use cases as a heavy email user (30-100 emails a day, an archive going back over about 8 years that I still use, frequent disconnected operation while travelling). No other client I have tried so far allows me to do _all_ IMAP operations in a disconnected way (such as moving messages to folders) and re-synchronize my local changes on the next IMAP server connection. This is still a point of frequent pain for me with Thunderbird, as I was utterly spoiled by the extremely robust KMail1 IMAP code for many years.