I experience this issue e.g. with kmail. If I click on links in an email (in the hope that the link gets forwarded to my webbrowser and opens a website) I very often get a persistent notification with the message that this url is contacted and it waits for it to reply, although my default web browser (firefox) opens the website happily at the same time. Additionally this notification has an "Open" button, which makes no sense to me, because if the url is unreachable, what should I want to "open"? I also do not understand why plasma itself tries to connect to the url when I actually want only firefox to connect to this website. Even in the rare case that the url isn't reachable I (and I think more people besides me) definitely don't want plasma to tell me, I want my browser to tell me. Reproducible: Always
Thanks for the report That is actually a KMail bug, I don't know the details, but either they are running some job and not setting an empty progress tracking or...something else (I have no clue about KMail). Reassigning. Can you tell which KMail version and distro that is?
Thanks for the swift reply and partial clarification. I use Gentoo with kmail 4.14.3.
This bug has never been confirmed for a KDE PIM version that is based on KDE Frameworks (5.x). Those versions differ significantly from the old 4.x series. Therefore, I plan to close it in around two or three months. In the meantime, it is set to WAITINGFORINFO to give reporters the oportunity to check if it is still valid. As soon as someone confirms it for a recent version (at least 5.1, ideally even more recent), I'll gladly reopen it. Please understand that we lack the manpower to triage bugs reported for versions almost two years beyond their end of life.
Just as announced in my last comment, I close this bug. If you encounter it again in a recent version (at least 5.1 aka 15.12, preferably more recent), please open a new one unless it already exists. Thank you for all your input.