One of the major complaints in the KMail User Survey was about the complexity of account management in KMail. The current workflow when adding a new account is:

1. add a new email account (let's say IMAP)
2. add an outgoing account
3. add an identity
4. wait for folders to sync from IMAP
5. re-open the configuration of the email account, select Trash folder and default identity to use
6. re-open the identity configuration and setup Sent, Drafts etc. folders

(that's the optimal workflow. If you swap steps 2) and 3) you will also have to go back to identity management after setting up the outgoing account to set it in the identity). This process involves going through three different configuration screens, several tabs, and multiple dialogs with more nested tabs - all in all, tons of pointless clicking around. And that's only if you are a seasoned KMail user and you know what to actually look for and where. Newcomers will get overwhelmed, completely lost and will go back to Gmail....

The Account Wizard streamlines this a lot, but not enough (e.g. it does not let you set up the Trash, Sent or Drafts folders). We should take a look at what Thunderbird and Evolution does and draw some inspiration from there. We should also take a good look at K9 Mail (an opensource email client for Android), which also has separate incoming and outgoing accounts and identities like KMail, yet they still manage to have a simple straight-forward wizard when adding a new account that handles all the setup in several simple steps.

I certainly want to keep the incoming, outgoing and identities concepts, but we need to reconsider how we present those to the user:

• we should consider merging them in Settings into the "Accounts" tab, so that everything related to accounts is in one place
• Clicking "Add" in the "Incoming" account tab should start the Account Wizard to guide user through the full setup

Some more actionables regarding the Account Wizard:

• It should allow user to choose an identity to use for the account and offer a simple way to create a new identity if user wants to
• It should allow user to choose an outgoing account as well and offer a simple way to create a new one if user wants to
• In case of IMAP/Kolab, once the resource is set up and folders synced, it should automatically detect and set up Sent. Drafts and Trash folders

T632 is also a somewhat relevant subtask for this task.

We can probably talk to Bjoern on the CM, he already proposed the overhaul last year and had some ideas how to improve it.