Closed Bug 370949 Opened 17 years ago Closed 17 years ago

Thunderbird apparently has a limitation on the number of characters that it can handle on a mailto link

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

x86
Windows XP
defect
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 253311

People

(Reporter: mark, Assigned: mscott)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1

Tried this from both Firefox and IE7.0 (I've been told that IE6 does the same thing as IE7 for this issue), both of which launch Thunderbird as a mail client.  I can't give you a URL that demonstrates the problem, because I'm inside a firewall.  I created a short web page, and all it does is:

<HTML>
<BODY>
<a href="mailto:name@domain.com,name1@domain.com,...">send mail</a>
</BODY>
</HTML>

When the number of characters after the colon, but before the closing double quote, exceeds 2031, nothing happens when I click the link in either of the above browsers.  I have verified that this is not related to the number of addresses -- I combined two addresses into one, with the same number of overall characters, and the problem still happens.

I also run Mozilla 1.7.13 on a Sun, but can not reproduce this problem.  That is, there doesn't seem to be any practical limit to the number of characters that can be in a mailto link -- the Compose window always appears.

That's why I think this might be a Thunderbird issue.  The version of Thunderbird I'm running is version 1.5.0.9 (20061207).  I've also heard reports of this happening when Outlook is the person's email client, but, of course, that's not within your pervue.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Create a web page as I indicated above.
2. Fill in the list of email addresses to the point where there are 2030 characters between the colon and closing double quote.
3. Bring the page up in a Firefox or IE browser, and click on the mailto link.  A Thunderbird compose window pops up.
4. Add one more character somewhere in the list of addresses, redo step 3, and nothing seemingly happens.
Actual Results:  
See above.

Expected Results:  
See above.

In some cases, IE will pop up a window that says:

Could not perform this operation because the default mail client is not properly installed.

It seems that I get this message when I just barely exceed the character limit.  When I go farther beyond it, then IE behaves as Firefox does -- nothing happens.
This is done on purpose. You can crash certain versions of Windows by trying to send a long URL into its "ShellExecute" function. (See bug 253311 for more information.)
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 17 years ago
Resolution: --- → DUPLICATE
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