If Akonadi fails to start, Kontact greys out the window and displays the error message, "The Akonadi personal information management service is not operational". Below this message is a "Details…" button. Clicking on the button has no effect. The button should instead launch a dialog window that displays details on why Akonadi cannot start (perhaps similar or identical to the output of running "akonadictl start" on the command line).
*** Bug 394768 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Can still reproduce with 17.12.3 of Debian Testing.