Hello,

I've come to notice an problematic behavior of KMail (and probably of KDE applications, too) of opening URLs. My systems default browser is Firefox. When I click on a link in a mail, KMails seems to do a request, followed by Firefox:

Code: Select all

some IP - - [04/Feb/2018:20:50:17 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5200 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) KHTML/5.42.0 (like Gecko) Konqueror/5 KIO/5.42"
same IP - - [04/Feb/2018:20:50:18 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 5200 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:58.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/58.0"

I wonder why KMail at all is doing a request in contrast to just handing the URL over to the browser.

This behavior can be problematic with verification tokens, e.g. I wasn't able to complete an ordering process with hetzner.com until I copied/pasted the link to Firefox.

* Is this intended behavior?
* Can this be reproduced on KDE desktops?
* Can it be ommited?

KMail 5.7.1, KDE Frameworks 5.42.0, Qt 5.10.0 (kompiliert gegen 5.10.0), Das xcb Fenstersystem
Window Manager is i3, distribution is Arch.

Thanks!

Another site which does not work this way is the link to the Discourse Forum One-Click Update which is sent in a mail.

Also you can't open Eurowings Booking Information from a link inside the confirmation mail, I needed to copy/paste the link to the browser.

https://www.senderscore.org is also broken by KMail.

Have you tried filing a bug at bugs.kde.org?

Yes, now: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=394599

I wanted to see first if there is anyone else noticed that and maybe having a workaround.

nebenan.de, a German local social network is also broken by KMails way of opening URLs.

I am a bit suprised that this problem has been ignored for so long. Does it only happens on non-KDE desktop? Can it be reproduced by you?

This is likely because KMail follows your system setting for file associations, and has to download the linked file to know which application to open it with. To change this open the "System Setting" application, click on the "Applications" icon, select the "Default Applications" tab, and select the "Web Browser" sub-tab. Now change "Open http and https URLs" from "in an application based on the contents of the URL" to "in the following browser:", click on the "..." button, and select Firefox from the application list.

Note that if you do this and then click on a link to a non-webpage, Firefox will likely silently download the file to your "~/Downloads" directory, while with the default settings KMail would have opened the file in the correct application automatically.