222019 - Ctrl+M to open compose window in default mail client

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Ray Trent]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20031002 Firebird/0.7+
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6a) Gecko/20031002 Firebird/0.7+

One of the really nice things about having mail and browsing combined in
Seamonkey was that there are frequently situations where you want to send an
email while browsing or browse while reading/sending email. 

I'd *really* like to see Ctrl-M open a Thunderbird compose window from Firebird.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[David Tenser [:djst]]

Tweaking summary.

Comment 2

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Cmd+M on Mac is already reserved for Minimize due to the HIG.  Default Mail
client is tricky to support on *nix, so this is a win-only bug at this point. 
It's a neat concept though.  Send Page in the content context area already does
this in a simple way...

Comment 3

[Robert Accettura [:raccettura]]

I must admit I like this idea.  Granted Control M can't happen on the Mac
(though I'm sure we can find an equivilant.

Web browsing is inherently somewhat integrated with Mail.  At least to an
extent.  This seems to satisfy that quite will, without going back to an app suite.

Comment 4

[Greg Campbell]

Although I agree with comment 3, this seems more like the job for an extension.
There are plenty of other apps it would be nice to open with a shortcut within
the broswer (IM, IRC, FTP client, media player, etc.), but that seems to go
beyond the scope of "regular broswer functionality."

I would much rather see an extension that adds both shortcut keys and toolbar
buttons to load other, user-defined, apps.

Comment 5

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

this would be good for mail integration, should at least be NEW

Comment 6

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

The whole purpose of the standalone applications is, that we really don't care
which mail application a user uses. We send out URLs to the standard mail
application but not specifically Thunderbird (see bug 173954). But how should we
know which mail app the user uses and how to open a compose window there? And
all of this in cross-platform way?

I strongly recommend WONTFIX.

Comment 7

[Ben Ruppel]

If we can coax firebird to not only open a compose window, but to open a compose
window AND have a mail recipient pre-filled when a user clicks on a mailto link,
I would think it trivial to open a compose window WITHOUT a recipient
pre-filled.  What if ctrl-M were handled just as the equivalent of a mailto:
with a blank in the recipient field?  I know this at least for windows, I'm not
up on the other platforms.

Comment 8

[David Tenser [:djst]]

Simon, just running "mailto:" (without email address) opens up a compose window
in the default mail client here. I doubt that it works in Linux though, since
that OS doesn't seem to have a protocol handler.

Comment 9

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

If just running mailto: is enough, I withdraw my objections

Comment 10

[Jeremy Hannon]

The mailto: option works great.  Just to double-check it, I made a bookmark on
my bookmarks tool bar with simply "mailto:" as the link.

All we need is to put the icon from Thunderbird's default theme as an option in
the customize toolbar box, and have it use launch the "mailto:" url.  Windows
will handle the rest.

As for other OSs, I believe some of them have hyperlink handling in a simmilar
fassion.  I am not an expert but I believe it should work for Mac OS X as well.
 Linux, I will leave that to someone else.

Comment 11

[Ben Goodger (use ben at mozilla dot org for email)]

Done, as part of 214893.