Mozilla mailto: issue

[Calum]

so my copy of mozilla (mozilla-1.4-1mdk) doesn't seem to have any mail settings in the preferences dialogue, so i presume mozilla mail is not installed. not a problem, i use mozilla-firebird, however when i click a mailto: link in mozilla, i get "mailto is not a registered protocol". how do i configure mozilla to open up a compose window in mozilla-firebird when i click a mailto link? this should be possible, if it isn't it would seem quite silly to me!

[Void Main]

I didn't think Firebird had a mail client? Can't you install the mail portion of Mozilla for your Mandrake? In Red Hat and Fedora there is a "mozilla-mail" RPM so you don't have to install the mail portion if you don't want it. Don't know if Mandrake is the same or not...

[Linux Frank]

Not sure of a complete answer, but here we go. Firebird has no mail client. Mozilla mail is bundled with Mozilla, not firebird, they also have a seperate mail client (thunderbird?).

Now if I am correct, testing will verify, when you have an unregistered protocol it is either something the browser cannot deal with (it's mailto so I don't think this is the issue) or it is looking for a specific type of application but does not know what to look for, or where to look for it, or both. There should be a section in your preferences, either mail and newsgroups type of thing or in helper applications where you assign this. Something like deafult mail application. Now you say you can't find mail section in the menu, so I am guessing setting something in helper applications is where you should start (a bit like setting up plugins).

You will not get a compose in Firebird, nor do you in Mozilla, what you are doing is opening a mail application's compose window. You will need a mail client installed such as mozilla mail, evolution, etc. (mozilla is the complete bundle, firebird, thunderbird, etc. are stand alone items).

Hope this helps a bit. I might be able to experiment tonight, but I'm v. v. busy, so maybe later this week.

[Calum]

gak!

i meant thunderbird i am sorry!

ok i have mozilla and mozilla-thunderbird installed. i really like thunderbird.

i DON't have firebird or mozilla-mail installed. there are reasons for this, i liked firebird back in the phoenix days, but have had a raft of niggling issues with it since 0.61. so no firebird. sorry for any confusion. i don't have mozilla-mail installed because i really like thunderbird. i'm not too keen on using mozilla-mail, i don't know why really, i just want to try thunderbird. i like it, it works, i prefer it to evolution, and perhaps to sylpheed.

however i know that in some installations of mozilla i have seen a mail and newsgroups section. this section is not there in my current mozilla. and the helper applications section looks like for registering downloaded file types with programs rather than for farming out network actions to other applications. ideally i'd change my mozilla version, but it's mandrake so i am reluctant to change to a non mdk rpm, and i kind of want to keep it as an rpm installation. also if i uninstall mozilla, galeon goes too, then i have to reinstall galeon once mozilla's back. i might just compile mozilla from source and use checkinstall to get it into the rpm database for galeon's benefit.

well i'm thinking aloud now, that's probably what i will do, then see if there's some easy way to do the thunderbird thing.

[Tux]

[off topic]
Hey Calum, I've heard you say a fair few times how you no longer like phoenix/firebird.
Could you perhaps make a new thread with the reasons why, i'm interested. (your free time permitting)

PS. Do you still use dillo?
[/off topic]

[Calum]

well i just find it irritating. firebird often seems to do erratic things like not starting after a while, till you delete all of your .firebird directory and also firebird looks in .phoenix too if you have one (which arses it all up too). just fiddly irritating things. plus i had irritating prefbarrelated issues too, like the prefbar disappearing even when prefbar.rdf is where it's supposed to be etc.

and yes i still use dillo, it is great! i don't use it often, i use galeon mainly now, but dillo is faster. it's like using xterm when i can't be bothered to wait the couple of seconds for gnome-terminal to open. also dillo seems to support a lot of things i thought it didn't (maybe it didn't before) like i can log in fine to phpBB2 forums such as this one etc. if void main is assiduous he may even spot the odd dillo hit from a month or two ago from a bt-broadband ip (don't bother void main, itt's not worth it, take my word for it!) which was me. dillo wins hands down for any slow or small system with X on it, it's the perfect browser for basiclinux for instance (which i haven't used since version 1.7 so i don't know if *that's* any use now!)

edit: just installing the SEA binary of mozilla from mozilla.org, but it's got a bug, you have to copy libxpistub.so from a version of mozilla pre 1.4 seemingly into /usr/lib (from /usr/lib/mozilla*/) for the installer to work.

another edit: fcuk it! i justgot another xpistub error, so am going for broke and downloading the tarball (binary) of mozilla 1.6b. we shall see. and i will have to install galeon again afterwards

[Void Main]

however i know that in some installations of mozilla i have seen a mail and newsgroups section. this section is not there in my current mozilla.

Like I said (or meant to say) I don't think that section will be in mozilla without installing "mozilla-mail". But I wouldn't be surprised that you could add a line to the "prefs.js" to handle the preferred mailer. A quick search on that logic turns up something that may prove fruitful to you:

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php? ... 2091605391

In fact, now that you mention it, I've been wanting Evolution send message to come up when I click a mailto: link in Mozilla. I'll see what I can come up with.

EDIT: That definitely worked for me but I don't think it will be enough information to do what you want, unless you have your preferred mail program set up as the system default. If it doesn't work maybe you can reap some more info out of the associated bugzilla report.