When I click on a "mailto:..." link, my computer opens my mail app. I expect that most of your computers do the same thing. For most of my email, though I use web-based email. I have to right-click on the mailto address, copy the email address, open a new tab in my browser, type in the url of my email provider, log in and then paste in the email address that the mailto: pointed to. If I accidentally click on the link then I also have to close my email app.
What I want to be able to to do is configure my browser to translate the mailto: to a url that points to my email provider, email address and passes on all the info from the mailto:. Then all I have to do is enter my password and I'm ready to go, with all the information that that was provided by the mailto: link.
I realise that this idea would need the web email providers to provide this url access into their accounts, followed by browser developers to implement support for the one or many standards that emerge. It shouldn't be beyond the wit of man to bring these two together.-- st3f, Feb 14 2007 mozex http://mozex.mozdev.org/index.htmlthere are others, but this does the trick [neilp, Feb 14 2007] G-Mailto: http://www.rabidsquirrel.net/G-Mailto/Third-party app that provides the functionality for gmail. [st3f, Feb 14 2007] hey [st3f] - this should do the trick for you (see link).-- neilp, Feb 14 2007 Thanks, neil. I thought there might be a plug-in somewhere that would do this. Mozex allows you to enter an app and parameters to respond to a mailto: url, so you should be able to enter your browser, a string that makes it go to a url and hopefully find some way of transferring and encoding the information from the mailto: into a url that gmail, yahoo or whever understands. I'd be interested to learn if anybody has got this working.
Google seem to have an alternative solution. Rumour has it that their mail notifier can be set as a target for mailto: requests. This applet translates the mailto into a url and pulls up the appropriate web page. I'm going to download it and see if the rumour is true. [update. yes it is. the mac version allows you to set gmail as your default mail app.]-- st3f, Feb 14 2007 Ideally, the 'mailto' link should be picked up by the browser which then supplies a drop-down menu of all the mail services available. For me, at home, this wouldn't matter as my desktop mail application is the same service as my free webmail (they provide an IMAP interface) but at work, I'd like the choice of linking to my work email application or my browser-based webmail.-- hippo, Feb 14 2007 Thanks to all. This 'problem' has occurred to me but I never gave it much thought. You've posted some interesting options here to consider.-- reensure, Feb 18 2007 random, halfbakery