Its tooltip states:
Sends an e-mail to the administrator.
There’s no feedback when it’s pressed, except the standard depression animation. However, even if there was, who is this ethereal “Administrator”? I own this machine, so why would it expose functionality to permit me to notify myself…?
Looks like it invokes /usr/bin/xdg-email
According to the man page:
xdg-email opens the user’s preferred e-mail composer in order to send a mail to address(es) or mailto-uri.
Since the code that invokes xdg-email doesn’t specify a recipient address, I guess the draft email is supposed to appear in your email client with a blank address field to populate yourself.
Not sure why it doesn’t appear on your machine though. Do the logs contain any error reported by xdg-email?
@pg-tips, journalctl -b 0 | grep xdg-email returns nothing, although running xdg-email returns:
grep:/home/RokeJulianLockhart/.local/share/applications//: Is a directory
…I didn’t run grep, which led me to wonder whether it’s a script. It is:
file $(command -v xdg-email)
/usr/bin/xdg-email: a /usr/bin/sh script, ASCII text executable
I ran it through Shell Check, and found nothing egregious. VSC was useless, too. [1] Got any idea of how to locally debug it, or have I misunderstood the syntax?
Interesting. On my system (KDE, with Thunderbird as default email client) it seems to do the right thing (i.e. xdg-email with no args gives me a new compose window in TB).
This isn’t rigorous analysis - I’m guessing based on your error message and a quick look at the code - but I wonder if the function desktop_file_to_binary is implicated here. That seems to do some manipulation of a file path under (among others) $HOME/local/share/applications and then try to grep inside the file located at the resultant path.
@pg-tips, I had thunderbird-128.11.1-1 installed too. However, I’ve since ascertained that, in kcm_componentchooser, I had “Email client” set to KMailService. After switching it to Thunderbird, it obviously now invokes:
After doing so, if I switch back to KMailService, nothing occurs, as before, but now without the error message in the CLI. Evidently, something had become misconfigured, which replacing the preference remediated. I wish I had the configuration file in git, so I could see what was modified!
Irrespective, KMailService appears useless, so I’ve asked KDE what it is: