After that we started with API-Review of the Mailtransport classes. Around 1920 everyone used to use their local sendmail application to deliver mail. That was ordered to deliver the mail as soon as the 14k4 modem has made a connection to the internet. A bit later people started to depend on the SMTP method to send mail. The application send the email to the provider which provides your internet connection and then it’s done. But now we are starting to support Microsoft Exchange Servers, we need a new way of sending mail. The feature Microsoft Exchange offers is that it also deals not only with incoming mail but also with outgoing mail. That means we needed to adapt our Mailtransport library to know which Akonadi Resources are capable of sending email.

When you compose a mail you have a selection bar, where you can indicate which provider/transport should be used for sending. That now has been extended to also show the resources that are capable of sending it. And that required a lot of changes. We combined it with nice features as sending messages after a specific date and time and moving messages after they have been send to a certain folder. To our surprise the whole morning was filled with reviewing the API and we have a pretty long list of stuff that has to change there.

After lunch we continued with the API review of IdentityManager. In this KDE cycle support has been added for images within signatures. Signatures in the context of mail messages which can hold company disclaimers for example. A much requested feature was that people (or company policy) needed to insert there company logo in the signature. A couple of KDE releases ago we added support for html based signatures and now we added the support for images. And those images need to be stored somewhere. But in a application independent way. The identities you setup are shared between KMail and Mailody and we need to prevent that breaks with the set image in the signature when you switch between those clients.

Continuing with yet more API review (really a weekend is to short for this). We continued with the API review of the widgets and classes provided by the new address book application. The classes are all in a library so other application can make use of them. One of the discussion points was about the dialog. When you for example click on a phone number and you have a voip phone, it can actually dial that phone number, the same goes for an email address. When you click it the default mail client is opened and the composer is launched. But if you show the dialog in an open composer, you want to add that address to the addressee list of that composer. Implementing that without making the API ugly needed some thinking.

In the evening Brad showed us the progress on Exchange support. He demonstrated Akonadi fetching mails, addresses and appointments from the Exchange server. Although it is in pre-alpha stage, it already shows that the resource is on the right track. From his side, there are pending requests for free-busy listing support and support for filtering. Both will be implemented sooner or later. His biggest problem, the mail sending part, is solved recently.