All of a sudden, kmail has begun to get loaded automatically upon login for one of the users on my PC.

I'm on Slackware-current (10.2) with KDE 3.4.2.

~/.kde/Autostart only contains kmix, and I have set KDE up to start with an empty session on login, not to remember last session.

Still kmail (and not the full Kontact as I always start it with) is loaded automagically on login, appearing after kmix, and before the korganizer daemon on the taskbar.

Anyone experienced kmail all of a sudden insisting to load upon KDE login? And know how to get rid of it?

Thanks!

-Y1

Is kmail configured to show in your system tray? (Settings-->Configure Kmail-->Appearance-->System Tray)

It's an idea, anyway...

Hi,

Yes, it's configured to show in the system tray, as it always have, but that doesn't explain why KDE at some point auto-loads the KMail application..

-Y1

True, it _shouldn't_, but that doesn't mean that it may not be related.

Admittedly, I'm not a kmail expert, but it might be a place to start.

Another idea: could it for some reason be reading /opt/kde/share/autostart?

Just tossing out ideas...

Thanks for your ideas. Answer is nope and nope. The config file that check the systray function is only read after kmail is started, ie after the problem occurs. To be sure I tried it as well, no success.
As for /opt/kde/share/autostart it can't be as this only occurs for one user, and not everyone, and there's no kmail links there either..

Thus I'm very puzzled why this all of a sudden appeared...

check .kde/Autostart for Kmail shortcut allowing mail checking on login. See http://www.skolenix.no/~klaus/newnotater/x3526.html for discussion of this topic.
Google can help find more info. pico /etc/rc.d/rc.local may have some info too. Good luck.

I'm sure you're just trying to be helpful, and by fear of scaring other people away from answering, may I humbly suggest taking an additional couple of seconds reading the original and previous posts, as this would quite early reveal that the Autostart directory does not contain anything other than kmix (which proves that this has been tested). Furthermore - rc.local is part of the system startup and is loaded when the system boots, not when a single user logs in.

Please get your facts straight before trying to help, as you may inadvertently end up breaking someone's system by passing blatantly wrong advise.

-Y1

Well, you have checked Autostart and whether the user is starting KDE with a saved session. Hmm.

Seems to me that I recall that KDE comes packaged with some kind of mail-fetch front-end utility (Korn). Possibly such a utility is running? Also, check the KDE Control Center: KDE Components->Service Manager. Might be something there.

Also, just a guess, are you starting KDE from runlevel 3? Perhaps the user's .xinitrc file might be auto-running KMail?

You also might want to delete all files located in $HOME/.kde/share/config/session. And there are bunch of files that can be deleted stored in /tmp/kde-$USER, /tmp/kdesocket-$USER, /tmp/mcop-$USER, /var/tmp/kdecache-$USER. Also consider deleting any .DCOP* files located in the user's home directory, as well as .ICEauthority.

Thanks Woodsman,

I have now tried the following - still unsuccessful:

1. Shutdown X
2. Delete all kde-, mcop and .Ice (and such) related directories in /tmp
3. Verified that ~/.kde/share/config/session is empty
4. Removed all .tmp and .new files from ~/.kde/share/*
5. Tried enabling session restore, login, logout, then disable - no difference (except that with session restore, it kept my browser, obviously)
6. Turned off,on, off KMails systray icon
7. grepped for KMail in all kde directories without finding anything useful

When timing things - it seems like KMail is loaded *after* the KDE-splash says everything is ready and up and running. Thus not when the session is restored or anything else.

This still affects only one user on the system.

Could this be a bug, or am I missing a hidden trigger somewhere?

-Y1

You try just deleting your .kde in your home directory?

Deleting .kde in the homedirectory would certainly remove the problem. In addition to removing the problem, it would also remove about one year of email correspondence, the entire address book, custom settings and a whole lot other information.

One would hope that taking such drastic measures would not be necessary.

What scares me is that advise such as this is given without *any* warning whatsoever about the consequences and near total loss of data. Once again with fear of scaring people from trying to help in these forums, but please - before giving advise that may remove vital user data, at least spend a couple of moments thinking about the consequences of your advise.

Asking someone to rm -rf ~/.kde is almost like asking to do a mkfs /dev/hda ...

-Y1

You know, I am fairly insulted by your reply.

I give you a suggestion that would certainly work. I assume you have the knowledge to realize that *you* have data in there that is important to *you*. If you want I can assume you are an idiot user who has gone on their first trip beyond the boundaries of a GUI.

As for emails, I don't know if you use pop or imap for email access so I don't know if you keep emails stored locally or remotely. Not all mail apps put mail in .kde. There is many email apps. Kmail, pine, mutt, Thunderbird, the list goes on. It's your system not mine.

It's called advice.

ad·vice Audio pronunciation of "advice" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (d-vs)
n.

1. Opinion about what could or should be done about a situation or problem; counsel.
2. Information communicated; news. Often used in the plural: advices from an ambassador.

It's my opinion about what should be done. It's your decision wether or not to take it, not mine. I use imap and keep all my emails on my email server. I don't keep any important data on my desktop/laptop, it's all on a server if its important. My data is also backed up and archived daily/weekly/monthly as well as my emails on the server. I could delete my .kde directory without a second thought and I would lose nothing more then the 3 seconds it would take to recreate it from a backup.

I don't know how you manage your system. I don't know what email app you use or where it puts things. I don't know if you backup things. I don't know whether you smash everything into your .kde directory. It's not my system. It's yours. Therefore it's your resposibility to take advice as just that. I wasn't trying to write a howto on backing up your .kde directory and then deleting it. A simple one line suggestion to a problem. Your the user, it's your system. If you did just delete your .kde directory without even thinking about backing up things then that really sucks to be you. I'm sure you wouldn't be making that mistake a second time and it would certainly be a hard lesson in thinking before you leap.

As the most intelligent life forms on the planet sometimes I really wonder.

Not if you do backups. And it's nowhere near the same.
You may be to that point. Obviously, you did something to cause this to happen. Started a program that caused kmail to fire up, or still does so. We are just coming up with solutions. Since you are that way, do it like this:

It is obviously in your .kde directory, so make a backup of it, delete one item at a time in your .kde directory, until you get the desired response. Then delete that one item in your backup, restore .kde, and you are up and running.

It's a very basic troubleshooting step. Try it that way.

Or keep complaining.


Either way, it's your system.

Rather than delete the ~/.kde directory, consider temporarily renaming: mv ~/.kde ~/.kde-old. Of course, you need to be at the command line and not in X/KDE before doing this.

I have had to do this a few times to troubleshoot weird KDE events and renaming rather than deleting sometimes provides me some clues about the problem. I easily restore/rename that directory a few minutes later. Yeah, I have to temporarily live with default desktop settings, etc., but renaming the directory provides a quick test and I lose no data and need not spend time restoring from backups.

Of course, this renaming test might not succeed because in the particular problem for this thread, you haven't yet narrowed the list of suspects. So a blanket renaming likely will remove or mask the root cause of the problem and resolve little.

Off topic, but FWIW, I would configure my email client to store all of my mail in a separate directory outside of ~/.kde, even if I was using a KDE-based client.

This particular problem is curious. Something is starting KMail, but what? You have deleted a bunch of the temporary files, but the problem persists. You don't need to delete or rename all KDE config files, but possibly rename only those related to KMail. You temporarily lose a lot of your configuration, but once outside X/KDE you can restore those temporarily renamed files. My wild guess, however, is that something external to KMail is triggering KMail into running. Possibly some obscure config setting in Kontact or Kopete or something like that.

This is my initial guess. Because email is the typical medium used to inform users of various process events, I wonder if your user has enabled some program/process that uses email to notify the user of events.

I would temporarily configure all KDE programs (Kontact, KAlarm, whatever, etc.) that autostart to stop doing so. That might provide a clue as to which program/process might be triggering KMail to start.

You did not mention whether you checked the user's KDE Control Center: KDE Components->Service Manager. As a test, you might want to disable everything there.

Have you tried opening a Konsole terminal and typing ps ax to see what KDE apps are running? That short list might provide a clue too.

Lastly, does the user have any desktop icons that remotely could be connected with autostarting KMail?

cwwilson, Woodsman,

Problem found. Turns out that Controlpanel's Resources section has a plugin for IMAP which triggers a bug/feature in KDE that causes KOrganizer Reminder Daemon to start KMail to check the IMAP Calendar plugin to check the calendar on the server.

As for the different measures necessary or not to isolate the problem, it has not been my intention to complain about this issue, but rather try to describe the problem as accurately and detailed as possible, and to report back when I've learned something new. Both to give pinpoints to KDE people more experienced than me, and to have a sufficiently thorough description to provide guidelines to others who may run into this problem in the future.

The reason why I object to one-line "smart" responses such as "delete it" is that people passing such advise has no way to know the comfort-level and experience of the others who read the thread, and possibly deleting so much valuable information without even spending another 30 seconds with a warning is something I maintain as irresponsible. Simply "mv .kde .kde.orig-$DATE" would be *far* safer for future thread-readers.

Furthermore, I feel it is important to be able to isolate such problems in order to be able to provide an as accurate as possible bug report to the KDE project. Together with the KDE maintainers we just isolated the problem 15 minutes ago, and now that they know exactly what causes the problem they are free to reproduce it and decide how to address it.

-Y1