GSoc/2023/StatusReports/AakarshMJ

Adding Email Composition to Merkuro (formerly Kalendar)

This project adds the ability to compose and send emails from Merkuro and this would improve the application in several ways. First, it would make it easier for users to manage their email from a single place by allowing users to compose emails without changing email clients. Merkuro already has a number of features that help users stay organized, such as the ability to create and manage calendars, tasks, and contacts. Having an email composition is a basic necessity of email clients. Adding email composition to merkuro would make it more competitive with other calendar applications. Many popular calendar applications, such as Thunderbird, Google Calendar and Outlook, already have the ability to compose and send emails. Merkuro would need to add this feature in order to stay competitive

Frontend for email composition

This was developed after constant discussion with the community. The initial proposed UI of email composition was changed and improved upon with the help of my mentors and community members.

Unexpanded UI

Expanded UI

Working Demo

Backend for email composition

The backend for email composition is currently under work. It makes use of kde personal information management (PIM) api to handle the backend. It stores the email inside a KMime::Message and MessageComposer::Composer classes. The email is encrypted and signed according to the user settings using GpgME library. The message is delivered using MailTransport::Transport. The particular user settings is retrieved from the database using akonadi client

Adding quality of life improvements to Merkuro Mail

These are the changes that improve the user experience without changing the core functionality of the software. All these changes have the goal of making the software more user-friendly, efficient, and enjoyable to use.

Added ability to use merkuro-mail to open mbox files

It adds the ability to make use of merkuro-mail to open mbox files. It makes use of newly created FIleopener in MimeTreeparser to achieve this.

Added Context Menu to the Sidebar

Added ability for users to create a new folder, delete an existing folder, access account settings and folder properties from the context menu of the sidebar

Added Mail Configuration Page in the settings

Added the option(link) to the mail configuration page in settings

Replacing Deprecated FormCard Header for identities in settings

This replaces the deprecated formcard header with MobileForm.FormHeader in settings page. The difference can be seen by comparing the 2 pics in this section and the previous one