KMail, KDE's default email browser, features a comprehensive set of graphical features, including filter creation, spam detection, archiving, and encryption, as well as extensive customization. All of these features make KMail an attractive choice, except for one thing: its default use of the KWallet password manager.

The intrusive KWallet constantly pops up for seemingly every action, resulting in many users wanting to disable it. Unfortunately, recent releases of KMail default to using KWallet without providing alternatives, not even manually entering passwords. Consequently, disabling KWallet can be difficult, and disabling cannot prevent error messages.

The problem is largely due to how KMail interacts with the rest of KDE. Like other personal information in KDE, KMail is administered by Akonadi, KDE's general storage system for personal information. Akonadi is seriously undocumented, and users often have to study the source code for information. Even worse, Akonadi has a history of frequent problems. Online, you can easily find complaints about the difficulty of working with Akonadi. For example, one Reddit post has as a subject line, "Akonadi is making me lose my will to live." While the original post has been removed, its first comment explains that "Akonadi can be … problematic. I've been using the whole Kontact suite for about two years now; it hasn't been terrible for me but I experienced several serious long-standing bugs along the way." The comment goes on to complain, "there are so many awesome new KDE apps such as Kalendar that I'd love to use but that all use Akonadi in the background" [1]. These sentiments are far from rare.

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