I think KMail2 listens to the network manager daemon and gets notified when to come back online. Konversation tries every 120 s no matter what and gives up after 3 times. It could become more clever. If it has potential to be a simple beginner task, I might want to do it myself. Some mentoring would be cool. Reproducible: Always
We already listen to network state and use it to gracefully suspend and resume connections, but I guess it's true we don't put freshly-instanciated connections under that regimen right away when the network is down at the time. I agree it'd be a nice addition. I'd be happy to mentor an attempt to implement it. You can find me as "Sho_" on freenode IRC in #konversation. Your starting point would be to read the ConnectionManager class, which is fairly self-contained.