A user reports recently upgrading one host from ubuntu 12.04 to 14.04 and kalarm stopped sending emails, with the error message Email Sending Failed: "Failed to get D-Bus interface of mailfilteragent" kalarmrc has EmailClient=sendmail and this worked before the upgrade. sendmail works when testing from a shell. (Same kalarm rc works fine on another fedora host.) Source: kdepim Version: 4:4.13.3-0ubuntu0.1
Here's the version that is having this sendmail challenge: $ kalarm --version Qt: 4.8.6 KDE Development Platform: 4.13.3 KAlarm: 2.10.10-ak $
I had some time to focus more on this issue and I think I found the fix after reading https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=290774 My Ubuntu 14.04 did not have kmail installed. Once I added that, emails seems to be working again. This seems strange since KAlarm is configured to use sendmail, not kmail. Tried this first: $ qdbus org.freedesktop.Akonadi.Agent.akonadi_mailfilter_agent Service 'org.freedesktop.Akonadi.Agent.akonadi_mailfilter_agent' does not exist. $ $ kmail The program 'kmail' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: sudo apt-get install kmail $ Then installed kmail: $ sudo apt-get install kmail ... $ And $ qdbus org.freedesktop.Akonadi.Agent.akonadi_mailfilter_agent / /Debug /KDebug /KPIMIDENTITIES_IdentityManager /MailFilterAgent /MainApplication $ Finally, when I did a email "Try" test in KAlarm I no longer get the D-bus mailfilter error, the mail is sent, and I received it. Let's see if upcoming alarms continue to succeed sending emails.
On my system using KDE 4.14.1, there is currently no error feedback to KAlarm when the mail fails to send due to akonadi_mailfilter_agent missing. This needs to be rectified, so that KAlarm can warn the user that sending failed, and preferably warn that akonadi_mailfilter_agent needs to be installed.
I have investigated adding error feedback about this problem, but there doesn't seem to be any easy fix due to the way that Akonadi handles sendmail requests, where it just initiates the request without monitoring its completion. In KDE 5, sendmail support is being removed from Akonadi, which makes spending a lot of time to fix this a bit futile. The KDE 5 version of KAlarm will need to revert to calling sendmail directly. This should be implemented soon.
A fix has been put in to KDE 4.14 to check for the presence of akonadi_mailfilter_agent if the sendmail option is selected, and a message is now displayed to the user if it is not found. Ideally the MailTransport job would provide feedback, but for the reasons given in the last comment, it isn't worth the effort of implementing this when the sendmail mechanism will have to be changed for KDE 5. Commit 78a8c9324afeb9881d93ec2aca845ddafa30514f (KDE4.14 branch). Sendmail still needs to be implemented in the KDE 5 version.
Sendmail has now been implemented again for the applications 15.08.03 release. This no longer uses the MailTransport library, since sendmail support has been dropped from that, and it therefore doesn't need akonadi_mailfilter_agent any more. Commit 2a3f9dd8168a76234e63a09544b5b36e466d1779 (15.08 branch), b28eb209056dccc3a3293b4eb8e261fd9d8145e9 (master).