KMail

Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 12 years (2014–2025), in 14 threads.

People raised many different problems with KMail, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 15 complaints

Silently stops working, forcing restarts several times a day2025-05-22
Becomes very slow with more than ten thousand emails, and its preferences are confusing2024-09-18
KDE4/5 version of KMail is hard to use, prompting switch to Thunderbird2024-05-31
Email editor makes the user scared to type anything2023-02-08
Removed reply-to-all default setting and shows reply button on messages without roll-down2021-08-06
Setup gave trouble and error messages were unhelpful, so the user gave up2021-04-03
Reply-to-all was made non-default and preference removed, making replies harder to do as expected2020-10-13
Hangs often, forcing users to kill and restart the mail backend2020-07-14
Hard to set up with multiple accounts, and easy to misconfigure2020-05-03
Incredibly complex and easy to misconfigure; import broke installation on new computer2020-05-03
Constant bugs, including connection loss spawning a thousand error boxes2019-02-25
New mail doesn't show in inbox until user repeatedly stops and restarts Akonadi2017-04-16
Enabling GPG encryption requires many hidden steps across settings and a separate key-management app2016-01-23
Settings interface is non-intuitive and poorly organized, hard to find things2015-12-01
Deleting a few hundred mails causes severe slowdown and misbehaviour2014-06-27