Is this discussion relevant? Just to have a reference of what is wrong with KMail

My vote is for Thunderbird. It's a reliable and feature-filled app and it looks great with the Breeze GTK theme. This drama with GMail support in KMail is itself a disqualifier IMO.

In T12486#216403, @ngraham wrote:

My vote is for Thunderbird. It's a reliable and feature-filled app and it looks great with the Breeze GTK theme. This drama with GMail support in KMail is itself a disqualifier IMO.

Personally I agree entirely with that. It is currently getting updates in the updates and security pockets from Ubuntu, so has that benefit on a LTS release.

It is currently installed by default in Ubuntu, Xubuntu, UbuntuStudio and UbuntuKylin.

LOL. The logical follow up, would be how much of the rest of the PIM app do we retain? The only one I use is Akregator, but I fully acknowledge that a RSS reader is slightly 'old hat' now. So I am not sure.

That might be best in a seperate discussion......

Moving to Tbird would make our lives easier. Still, this makes me sad. Perhaps if the Kmail team fixes the gmail issue we can revisit after the LTS is out the door?

Something to keep in mind is that shipping without any of the PIM apps lets us avoid shipping with Akonadi, avoiding a pain point and big source of memory usage. Might also free up space on the ISO.

sadly desktop email has been a sore spot on Linux for a long time. I think Thunderbird is likely the best of the current options for Kubuntu to include.

Regarding Rik's comment about PIM and Akregator. I think RSS Feeds are incredibly valuable BUT they aren't that commonly used even when they were the "big trend" so having it as a default app is unnecessary in my opinion. There are also many RSS feed readers these days for Linux with the most popular options being self-hosted web-based solutions so I would vote to remove that if KMail and Akregator are the only reasons the system is included by default

Ok, lets give this a trial BEFORE we hit feature freeze.....

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/kubuntu-meta/1.395

kubuntu-meta (1.395) focal; urgency=medium

• Refreshed dependencies
• Test dropping of KDE PIM for thunderbird. https://phabricator.kde.org/T12486
  • Added thunderbird to desktop-recommends
  • Removed akregator from desktop-recommends [amd64 arm64 armhf]
  • Removed kaddressbook from desktop-recommends [amd64 arm64 armhf]
  • Removed kdepim-runtime from desktop-recommends [amd64 arm64 armhf]
  • Removed kleopatra from desktop-recommends
  • Removed kmail from desktop-recommends [amd64 arm64 armhf]
  • Removed knotes from desktop-recommends [amd64 arm64 armhf]
  • Removed kontact from desktop-recommends [amd64 arm64 armhf]
  • Removed korganizer from desktop-recommends [amd64 arm64 armhf]