Bug 109926

Summary:	Kmail does not warn when distribution list is empty
Product:	[Unmaintained] kmail	Reporter:	Oded Arbel <oded>
Component:	composer	Assignee:	kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED UNMAINTAINED
Severity:	normal	CC:	bjoern
Priority:	NOR
Version:	1.8.2
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	unspecified
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:

Description Oded Arbel 2005-07-31 11:25:50 UTC

Version:           1.8.2 (using KDE 3.4.2, Mandrake Linux Cooker i586 - Cooker)
Compiler:          gcc version 3.4.3 (Mandrakelinux 10.2 3.4.3-7mdk)
OS:                Linux (i686) release 2.6.12-8mdk

When a distribution list contains 0 items (happened to me after I lost all me contacts, but that's another bug report), when selecting it as an destination address (even when it the only destination address), not warning message is shown to the user (and the list is also visible in the "selected addresses" dialog, although its clearly marked there as having 0 email addresses).

Also, and worse, in said case the distribution list name is not expanded to its values (being none) and instead the email is sent with the name of the distribution list as the destination address, which will cause the SMTP mail server to try to send the email to the address <distribution list name>@<server's default mail domain> which is something less then useful (as probably the first indication the user gets that something went wrong, is the email server's cryptic bounce message - if that is even configured).

I would expect that kmail would expand the distribution list to its values before contacting the SMTP server, possibly before even closing the compose dialog, and will warn the user that there are no recipients (as it does now when no recipients are present in a message being composed). IIRC that was the behavior for Kmail 1.6 and it was changed somewhere along the way, I believe in order to allow users to edit emails in the outbox and still treat distribution list recipients correctly in the edit email.

Comment 1 Sebastian Reitenbach 2005-11-02 19:23:43 UTC

I have seen this also, using kmail 1.8.92 in KDE 3.4.92 (beta2, >= 20051010) on SuSE 9.3.

Comment 2 Björn Ruberg 2009-12-21 20:41:34 UTC

Is this still an issue in KDE 4.3?

Comment 3 Oded Arbel 2009-12-22 17:24:09 UTC

I don't have KDE 4.3 installed. The last stable version of KDE I used was 4.2, and I didn't stay long (it wasn't very usable for me).

I'm currently testing the 4.4 beta, and there I can't even select a distribution list for the mail recipient so I can't test it. Many mail functions do not work well or do not work at all with 4.4 beta, and I'm not sure if I need to report them all or assume that developers are working on them and wait for the next beta.

Comment 4 Björn Ruberg 2009-12-23 11:41:02 UTC

Okay, confirmed now.

Comment 5 Laurent Montel 2015-04-12 09:43:03 UTC

Thank you for taking the time to file a bug report.

KMail2 was released in 2011, and the entire code base went through significant changes. We are currently in the process of porting to Qt5 and KF5. It is unlikely that these bugs are still valid in KMail2.

We welcome you to try out KMail 2 with the KDE 4.14 release and give your feedback.