Version: unspecified (using KDE 4.7.0) OS: Linux I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to have error messages that are triggered by background services are (modal) message boxes. Whenever there is an error with something and even if it is just a temporary thing, you will get a message box. Luckily we have KWin’s focus stealing prevention. Make *all* those nasty warning, error, whatever dialogs passive notifications that appear in systray and that you can deal with or leave them. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: Do something that triggers an error, for example turn off network and fetch e-mails or enter a wrong password Actual Results: An annoying message box appears stating that something went wrong Expected Results: A passive popup notification appears stating that something went wrong but that does not force you to deal with it (by closing it or whatever)
I think most of the annoying error messages have become passive now. Just the filtering error messages "Cannot filter message (No item in collection found)" or so is still a dialog box.
Thank you for reporting, Kai Uwe! However I'm not sure that's the way to go, as the underlying bugs need to be tracked down and fixed, prevented or caught in Akonadi or kmail. Others are errors that require user input. Kmail does an increasingly good job in this. Regarding your first example, it now says "No network connection detected. All network jobs were suspended." in status bar and doesn't even bother to trigger Akonadi. In your second example (wrong credentials), triggering a dialog absolutely makes sense. It just shouldn't open in the background, but on top as a modal (being fixed in Bug #294208). I therefore propose closing this wishlist here as WONTFIX.
I will close it. So far I haven't encountered any modal interrupting error dialog box in the past year. Good job :-)