1726135 - Offer "Copy Link" in parallel to "Copy Email Address" not to lose mailto: URL parameters

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Menus, enhancement)

Description

[S. Jones]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/99.0.7113.93 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to a site with an email link
2. Right click the link
3. The "Copy Link" option is missing, there is only "Copy Email Address".
4. Clicking on this ONLY copies the email address, the Subject is lost
5. There is no way to get the subject
6. Thus, no way to email people using the subject they specify in the link

Expected results:

If someone has provided a link to an email with a specific subject, you should be able to easily click to get this in the clipboard.

Comment 1

[Andre Klapper]

Hi, what is a "subject"? Please provide specific and full steps with a specific example and its HTML code. Thanks!

Comment 2

[S. Jones]

Hi, what is a "subject"? Please provide specific and full steps with a specific example and its HTML code. Thanks!

OK, let me give more specific details...

Problem

1. Go to https://redrec247.co.uk/
2. Search page for "email us" near the bottom. This text is a "mailto" link designed for POP mail clients such as Outlook Express. (For more details on "mailto" links, see Wikipedia.)
3. The target of this link is as follows:
   href="mailto:[e-mail]?subject=Please%20consider%20me%20to%20become%20a%20Red%20Family%20member%20-%20CV%20attached"
4. Clicking the link will open a new email in the user's POP mail client, along with the relevant email subject (the email "subject" being the title of the email). In this case, the subject is "Please consider me to become a Red family Member - CV attached").
5. Many internet users don't use a POP mail client, and instead use web mail (such as Gmail). In this case, mailto links do not work directly, instead one must copy and paste the details into your email web client (eg Gmail).
6. There is currently no way to do this in Firefox. When you right-click the email link, the only option you are given is "Copy email address". This ONLY copies the email to the clipboard ("[e-mail]") and completely omits the subject. (It likely also omits the CC, BCC, and body fields if they have been specified.)
7. The email subject is important because it is typically used to ensure the email is filed in the right place. Indeed, many offices automatically delete any emails which don't use the correct subject as a means of preventing spam.
8. In other words, if you try to use Firefox to send an email to the above site, there's a good chance your email might never be received because it will not include the subject specified by the webmaster, and thus could be regarded as spam. There is no way to extract the subject to the clipboard, other than using "inspect element" which is too advanced and difficult for most users.

Solution
The solution is incredibly simple. The "Copy Link" context-menu function should NOT be omitted for email links. There is no logical reason to omit the "Copy Link" function. I would also suggest that the "Copy email address" function be removed as it isn't particularly useful, given that it ignores the subject field.

Comment 3

[Andre Klapper]

If you paste mailto:[e-mail]?subject=Please%20consider%20me%20to%20become%20a%20Red%20Family%20member%20-%20CV%20attached into your email web client (into the address field? or where?), does that actually set the subject line? If it does, which email web client does that?

Comment 4

[S. Jones]

Any user who uses a POP mail client (eg Outlook Express, Apple Mail, or Thunderbird) can click a mailto link and it will automatically open a new email in the client with the correct subject. There is no need for copying or pasting, it only requires one click. But for those of us who do not use POP mail, we are dependent upon the clipboard, and thus we need access to all the fields specified in the mailto link.

Comment 5

[Andre Klapper]

I am aware of all of that and it does not answer my question.
For mail client applications, the browser uses the operating system's underlying protocol (mailto:) handling system and passes the string to another application (a POP mail client) that knows how to deal with mailto: strings and its parameters, and where to put them.

I still don't see how a web browser should know which specific input field on random webmail websites is supposed to receive/pre-fill which specific parameter. There is simply no standard for this, so I'm asking you how this should work and which email web client supports this.

Comment 6

[S. Jones]

I am very sorry but I don't understand where your confusion lies or how I can help. Perhaps the information on this article will help? https://mailtrap.io/blog/mailto-links-explained

Comment 7

[Andre Klapper]

Hi, please see and answer my question in comment 3, and please provide a list (!) of the current steps that you perform with that string in comment 3 copied into your clipboard and then somehow (?) using it in a web email interface. Thanks.

Comment 8

[Andre Klapper]

(Plus what is requested here in the end? To offer "Copy Link" in parallel to "Copy Email Address"?)

Comment 9

[S. Jones]

Sorry sir, I see what you're asking now. I'm not aware of any way to paste an email link into Web email clients and have the Web client automatically parse the fields. This has always been a manual process, as far as I'm aware. I can't speak for others, but for the last 25 years I've always done it like this:

1. Hover over the link to confirm it's a mailto link
2. Right click and copy link to clipboard
3. Go to my web email client
4. Click in the "To:" field and paste
5. If there are additional fields such as ?Subject= then cut this from the end of the email address
6. Paste the subject into the "Subject:" field and remove "?Subject="
7. Any spaces in the Subject (%20) are always pasted as spaces so there is no need to convert them.

Obviously, this is not a very elegant way of using mailto links, but they are not intended for Web clients, so those of us who use Web mail just have to work around it, since we're in the minority.

I know that many people don't regard Web mail as valid email, and don't want to have to pander to us. Some sites even ban clients like Hotmail. Nevertheless, there are a lot of us who use it. Gmail in particular seems to be very popular these days.

Comment 10

[BugBot [:suhaib / :marco/ :calixte]]

The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Firefox::Address Bar' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please revert this change in case you think the bot is wrong.

Comment 13

[Vincent Lefevre]

Dup of bug 520300?

Comment 14

[Ada C.]

Hi, S. Jones,

Does the issue still occur on your side? Could you check if bug 520300 is similar to this situation?
Thank you!