In system settings => applications => default applications, you have a choice between kmail or other, where you can then type in something else like thunderbird. At present (KDE version 5.12 is current on Tumbleweed), this doesn’t work. If you click on a mailto link, kmailservice will launch.
What’s kmailservice? It’s not a program per se but a *.desktop file that specifies what mail program to open the mailto link with. You can find it in /usr/share/applications/kde4/. In the line that starts “Exec=” just replace kmail with your mail handler of choice. For instance, if you want to use gmail in your browser,
By not using kmail or any other part of the KDE personal information management (PIM) suite, you’ll never start akonadi. Akonadi is difficult to exorcise from KDE, but it’s a hungry dragon, and when it starts, it approximately doubles KDE’s resource usage. If you find it useful to utilize cloud services for PIM, then letting the sleeping dragon lie may let you see better performance on your local system.
Sorry, Knurpht, and thank your for administrating.
PS: Setting up wemail as the default for mailto as described above only works if the webmail service is enabled as the mail handler in your browser. (For chrome, go to the webmail site and click on the handler icon in the address bar that looks kind of like an eye.) Obviously most mailto links will be found on the web, but the kmailservice.desktop hack will wok for those you run across in a downloaded document.
That’s OK, that’s what we’re here for.
But. on-topic: I think you’re barking up the wrong tree. Check KDE’s file associations, IME and IMO a ‘mailto:’ reference should start kMail ( and on my systems it does ).