171869 - tag MAILTO not supported

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 33282

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[Enrico]

I would like to have a preference entry where I can specify a default Mail
program to be used when clicking on a MAILTO link.
At the moment the mailto tag seems not to be supported (i.e. I click byt nothing
happen).

I wish you the best luck for this really smart (sub)project!

Enrico

Comment 1

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

On windows we dispatch to the system default mail app. On linux we apparently do
nothing. 

Comment 2

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

I don't think we should have a preference. If it's possible, we should find out
what the default mail application is and use that. Is there an equivalent to the
windows registry in popular linux distros?

Comment 3

[Enrico]

I don't think so. KDE and GNOME have their "default" mail programs but in
general there is not a standard environment variable that identifies it.

If you don't think that creating a pref option can be a solution (as it ought be
only  Linux/Unix specific), an idea could be to add to phoenix shell script a
line where one can edit a variable (say, PHOENIX_MAILER) that point to the mail
executable program.
Somethink like

if [ ! -n "$PHOENIX_MAILER" ] ; then
  PHOENIX_MAILER='mailprg --subject %s --to %t'
fi

When one click on the mailto tag, the mail program should be launched replacing
%s and %t

Comment 4

[Enrico]

I've downloaded the last build and it does not crashes anymore. So this BUG can
be removed.

Anyway, I guess there is a problem with the window manager I use (FVWM2) or
font: the customize window appears as a "splash window" without any frame and
the "close" button is visible only partially.
...
Just checked, this is bug 171454!
I'm changing this bug to fixed.

Comment 5

[Enrico]

Plesed discard my previous entry... it was for another bug!
Sorry!

Comment 6

[benc]

bz was telling be about protocol handlers in Linux, but I don't remember WHAT he
told me.

Comment 7

[Asa Dotzler [:asa]]

I've done some research on this and here's what I've learned. The right thing
here seems to me to be that we just use the system default which for GNOME linux
would be implemented either at bug 140635 or bug bug 128668. If people want to
override the system default or don't have a system default or don't use GNOME
then they'll  probably have to wait for the work over at bug 33282 which has a
patch that implements a generic mechanism for handling any protocol with a helper.

Please remember that bugzilla is not a user support tool. Please do not comment
in any of these bugs (the kind that tend to get too noisy to be useful) unless
you're actually working on fixing that problem. Thanks. 

I'm going to pick 33282 and dupe this bug there since that seems closest to what
the original report was suggesting. (although I think having both and defaulting
to the system setting first is the right way to go). 


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 33282 ***

Comment 8

[Travis Ogdon]

Asa, 

I may be picking nits here, but my reading of 33282 implies that there's no
intention of handling mailto: with the generic protocols:. Specifically comment
#89 points to 11459 as the correct bug for mailto: handling while at the same
time implying that the work to get mailto: working from the 33282 patch has been
commented out as we'd like Mozilla Mail/News to be the default.

I don't know if you want to change this bug and the other phoenix mailto: bug to
mark them as duplicates of 11459. I think that people probably care about an
alternate mailto: handler a little more with phoenix as there's (thankfully) no
Mail/News client included...

Comment 9

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

Mass verifying of old duplicates.