New Bug In Kmail / Kontact Causes Crash On First Run

Recently it was reported on the Ubuntu Bug Tracker that KMail / Kontact will exhibit some undesired behavior on first run with new KDE Plasma installs. According to the bug report, the bug affects Debian-based distributions that offer KDE Applications 18.12.3 - which as of today is current. According to the report, running KMail subsequently will not yield the error, so users should not be overly alarmed here.

According to the report, on first run, the user will get the following error:

"org.kde.

pim.akonadicore: Failed SpecialCollectionsRequestJob::slotResult "Invalid parent"
org.kde.pim.mailcommon: "The Email program encountered a fatal error and will terminate now.\nThe error was:\nInvalid parent" "

As of right now, the bug's reporting only affects Debian / Ubuntu installs - and has been confirmed on both KDE Neon and Kubuntu, as well as Debian Buster. We can also assume the bug will be present on other sibling distros as well, such as Linux Mint running KDE, etc. What is not (yet) known is if this bug also affects non-Debian distributions, such as Arch or Fedora. 

Of note is that this only affects actual installs, as running Kontact from a live session (i.e. DVD or USB stick) works fine, as I've confirmed in the screenshot below using Kubuntu 19.04 beta.

Runnning KDE PIM (Kontact) in a Kubuntu
Live session does not reproduce the bug

The bug has since been reported to the KDE Bug Tracker, after being listed on both the Ubuntu and Debian bug trackers, respectively. It appears to perhaps be Akonadi based. So far, no fix has been proposed. However, we can assume one would be forthcoming before too long.

Let's hope so, so that users do not get scared away from trying out this important and long-standing piece of KDE Applications.