I tried to configure my corporate Google account on Kontact but failed

[romariorios]

I have a corporate Google account and as per the recent KDE Gear 24.02 update I decided to try using Kontact.

Email: I couldn’t get it to authenticate. GMail only works through OAuth, but the account wizard didn’t understand my corporate email is a corporate Google account and threw me to manual configuration, which I couldn’t successfully configure.

(But I also tried logging in with my regular GMail and it didn’t work either. The configuration finished, but I wasn’t getting any emails)

Calendar/Contacts: It worked well, honestly looks way better than Thunderbird. Unlike email, OAuth works here for some reason. But then I got a ton of error dialogs, to the point where my system froze completely:

Yup. 54 error dialogs at the same time before my system froze.

Has anyone else managed to fully configure a corporate Google account (or hell, even a regular Google account) in Kontact?

[romariorios]

Little update on this:

• The error explosion apparently came from the calendar and it didn’t happen again (yet) after rebooting
• I managed to get IMAP working and all my email is coming through just fine
• SMTP almost worked, but it keeps opening Google’s authentication page in the browser over and over again

I’m not sure the SMTP thing is a bug, I’ll try it again. But regardless, my current impressions are:

• Configuring an account is rough, but at least it works when it works
• After everything is set up, Kontact feels way more pleasant than Thunderbird. I hope I can solve the STMP issue because I really want to keep using it as my daily driver

[romariorios]

SMTP problem solved. Turns out my username was incorrect (it should be romariorios@company.domain instead of just romariorios), which was why Google kept asking me to authenticate over and over again.

Although I managed to figure this out on my own, it’s not a pleasing process, so I’ll leave a mini-guide to those who face the same situation in the future.

Mini-guide: configuring a corporate Google acount in Kontact

Email

Since corporate email addresses don’t end in @gmail.com, the account wizard won’t help. You’ll have to configure IMAP (to receive emails) and SMTP (to send emails) by hand.

• IMAP: Settings > Configure KMail… > “Receiving” tab > Add… > set IMAP server to imap.gmail.com > set user to username@company.domain (don’t forget the domain) > “Advanced” tab > click “Autodetect” > “Authentication” field should be “Gmail” > click “OK”

• SMTP: Settings > Configure KMail… > “Sending” tab > Add… > set SMTP server to smtp.gmail.com> Check “The server requires authentication” > set user to username@company.domain (don’t forget the domain) > “Advanced” tab > click “Autodetect” > “Authentication” field should be “XOAUTH2” > click “OK”

Calendar and Contacts

Settings > Configure KOrganizer… > “Calendars” tab > Add… > Google groupware

Then wait a few minutes before interacting with the calendar, otherwise Kontact might through a ton of errors about it being “unable to delete event”