Kontact is the personal information management program of KDE. You can use Kontact as only a PIM manager, or you can adopt Kontact as a groupware application. Kontact supports many groupware functions out of the box. These include KOLAB (2.1), SuSE Linux OpenExchange Server (4.1), eGroupware (1.0), OpenGroupware.org, Citadel (6.41) and Novell GroupWise (6.5). The supported version numbers are in the parentheses. Possibly, you have noticed that Microsoft Exchange is not on the list. This is true. For the time being, you can only connect to Microsoft Exchange 2000 through some tweaking, which is not supported by the KDE PIM team. Kontact cannot work with Microsoft Exchange 2003 and later, thanks to Microsoft’s proprietary protocols.
When you open Kontact, you will immediate notice the efficient use of the screen space. Instead of eating up space with the extended words, the functions are presented on the left hand side. You can immediately jump to a function from this pane. Let’s see each item one by one.
Summary View
This is where you have an overview of the upcoming days. You are presented with the number of e-mails, calendar items, pending to-dos (tasks), and any other items that you want to be shown here. You can add or remove information from the summary view by going through Settings -> Configure Kontact. One important distinction from other collaboration applications is the option to define an anniversary that is different from a calendar item. If you had done so, the anniversaries are displayed separately from the appointments, making it easier to distinguish your beloved’s birthday, which would appear somewhere between the meetings in other programs.
Mail
E-mail management is much more easier and flexible with Kontact. I've always wished I could use Kontact at work (and Linux, to be exact) because it has features that Microsoft Outlook has yet to implement. One of these features is showing conversations by thread and managing them as a whole. How many times you have searched for an e-mail in a particular conversation by sorting by name, sorting by subject, sorting by date, etc.? Kontact has the option to display your e-mail in a thread, therefore allowing you to find whichever mail you want.
E-mail folder management is made easy by adding “Favorite folders” to the top left pane, enabling you to access the folders you define with one click. Also, trules are present, but under the “filters” name. You can define as many filters as you wish by going through Message → Create filter. Do not get confused if you cannot find anything except "filter on subject," "filter on to," and "filter on cc." Actually, you can click any of those and change the options as you like.