440420 - Webmail handler creates malformed address fields with Yahoo! Mail Classic

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox :: File Handling, defect)

Description

[sometimespaco-forms]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9) Gecko/2008052906 Firefox/3.0

PRE-REQ:

You must be using Yahoo! Mail Classic.  This is the non-AJAX version of Yahoo! Mail.

If you have a Yahoo! Mail account (or just signed up for a new one), you will see a text link "Mail Classic" at the top of the page, just to the right of the Yahoo! Mail banner.  Click that link to switch to 'classic' mode.

EXCEPTIONS:

This problem does NOT reproduce if you are using the AJAX version of Yahoo! Mail (aka Candygram).  With that version, mailto: links are handled just as one would expect.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Log-in to your Y!Mail account and make sure you're in Classic mode.
2. Go to a website with a mailto: link (Craiglist for example has a mailto: link for every item listed).
3. Click on a mailto: link.
4. A new Y!Mail email composition page will appear, but the address and subject fields are not correctly populated.  Instead, you will see the mailto: text all in the "to:" field of the email.
Actual Results:  
This is what I see in the "to:" field of a new email after clicking on a mailto: link on a Craigslist ad for a raft:

mailto:[e-mail]?subject=Raft, 2-3 person - $40 (Maplewood/Oakdale/Woodbury)


Expected Results:  
I should've seen an email composition page with the "to:" and "subject:" fields correctly filled-in.

There are no statistics handily available about the number of Y!Mail users who use the Classic mode.  Anecdotally, I'd say a lot do.  As a former Y! employee, I recall that the AJAX version (Candygram) had major stability and security issues in it's first public release, so lots of users switched back to Classic.  While Candygram is much more stable now, I'm sure that many users have never bothered to check it out again after the first release.

Also, I'm not sure if there's any public API available that indicates which version/mode of the Y! Mail client is selected by the user.  Maybe it's something in the URL - if it is, it's not obvious like "mode=classic". 

WORKAROUND:

Switch from Yahoo! Mail Classic to Candygram.

Comment 1

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

Manuel, any thoughts on the right thing to do here?

Comment 2

[Manuel Deschamps]

Hi guys,

the description of the bug is correct. Candygram handles the mailto correctly and Classic does not. The reason is that "new" version of Classic was just released that didnt include these changes.

I am opening a bug in our internal bugzilla and I will escalate it to their Product Manager to get it fix ASAP.

I will keep you posted about when the fix rolls out.

Thanks
Manuel

Comment 3

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Bug is in Yahoo's impl, not Firefox