"A proposal to host Akonadi on was refused [but] I would love to see GNOME API in Akonadi," Hards said.

KDE 3.5 had a PIM framework but the components ran as separate processes looking like a single groupware program.

"KMail is a fairly big maintainability problem for KDE [and] the changes from KDE 3.x to KDE 4.x are huge," Hards said. "In the KDE 4 series we want to separate the networking part from the UI and solve some technical problems like address book accessibility."

The Akonadi "server" is a client-only application that acts as an information broker to the "client" applications like Kmail.

Akonadi uses MySQL as the database and not all KDE applications have been ported to it so Hards expects production-ready integration with an Exchange server with the KDE 4.3 release due in mid-2009.