The Network tab contains the settings that tell KMail how to send and receive your email. Many of these settings can vary greatly depending on the setup of your system and on the kind of network that your mail server is located. If you do not know what setting to choose or what to put in a field, consult your Internet Service Provider (ISP) or System Administrator.
The Sending Mail section provides two options for sending messages: sendmail and SMTP. Sendmail has a reputation of being difficult to set up, so if you do not already have a working sendmail configuration, choose SMTP and fill in the Server field with the name and domain of your mail server. You will probably not need to change the Port setting (the default is 25).
If you do want to use sendmail and you are using a dial-up connection, follow the instructions for setting up sendmail for a dial-up connection in the FAQ section.
The way of sending messages configured here will be used for your default identity and for all other identities that have no own way of sending messages. You can use different ways of sending messages for different identities by adding them with the Add Transport... button in the Identity section.
The Properties section lets you configure how and when messages are sent.
Default send method lets you define what happens when a message is sent. If Send now is selected, the message is sent to the mail server immediately, while if Send later is selected, the message is queued in the outbox to be sent later with the File->Send Queued command or automatically when you check your mail, depending on the settings in the Miscellaneous tab.
Message Property lets you select how your message will be encoded when it is sent. Allow 8-bit means that KMail will send your message in 8 bit ASCII, which means that all special characters such as accented letters will be sent as-is. If MIME Compliant (Quoted Printable) is selected, special characters will be encoded using standard MIME encodings, which may be more portable to other mailing systems than 8-bit ASCII. You normally do not need to change the default.
With Precommand you can specify a command that will be executed before your messages will be sent.
Confirm before send enables a dialog that asks, every time you click Send now, if you really want to send your mail.
To set up an account so you can receive mail, press the Add... button in the Incoming Mail section. You will then be prompted for the type of account. Most users should select Pop3 or IMAP.
After pressing OK you will be presented with the Add Account window. First, fill in the Name field to name your account. You can choose any name you like. Login, Password, and Host should be filled in with the appropriate information from your ISP or System Administrator. You should not need to change the Port setting (the default for POP3 is 110, the default for IMAP is 143).
If you are using IMAP, you can optionally specify a path in the Prefix to folders field. This tells KMail where it can find your folders on the server. If you also have a shell account on the server and the mails are stored in your home directory it might be useful to store the mails in a subdirectory /Mail/. Use this as a value in the Prefix to folders field so that KMail does not mix up mailbox files and other files. Note that even with a slash as the first character, this path is interpreted relatively to your home directory. If you are not interested in this feature, simple leave the field blank.
If you check Automatically expunge deleted messages KMail removes the mails you deleted from the server as soon as you leave a folder. Otherwise the mails are only marked as deleted and it is up to you to compact the folders manually by using the menu item Compact all folders.
If you check Show hidden folders, folders whose name starts with a dot are also displayed.
Select Delete mail from server if you don't want to leave your messages on the server after you downloaded it.
Select Exclude from "Check Mail" if you don't want to check this account whenever you use Check mail. You can still check for new messages on this account with File->Check Mail in.
Select Enable interval mail checking if you want KMail to check for new messages automatically. The interval can be specified below under Check interval (minutes).
inbox is the default folder for incoming mail. If you want to change that for some reason, you can do so with Destination folder. But what you probably want is a filter, which has nothing to do with this option.
With Precommand you can specify any program that KMail will execute just before fetching mail. Please specify the full path and note that KMail will not continue until the program returns.
If you select Store POP password in configuration file resp. Store IMAP password in configuration file KMail will remember your password so you won't have to type it every time you start KMail and fetch new mail.
Be warned that we cannot really encrypt your password, so people who can access your configuration files (e.g. system administrators) can easily get your password if you select this option.
KMail supports encryption via SSL and TLS (TLS should be preferred if it is available).
For POP3 KMail supports Clear text, PLAIN, CRAM-MD5 and APOP authentication. APOP and CRAM-MD5 are secure on their own, all the other options are only secure when used together with SSL or TLS. You should only use Clear text if your server doesn't support any of the other authentication methods. Additionally, for IMAP Anonymous is supported.
You are now ready to send and receive mail! For IMAP, click on the + sign in the folder tree in KMail's main window. KMail then connects to your server and displays the folders it finds. For POP3 use File->Check Mail.