mailto protocol in firefox (OT?)

[Patrick Wiseman <pwiseman@mindspring.com>]

This may be OT, but I've experienced the mailto frustration in firefox as
a debian user, and so offer a solution to other debian users.

The script reproduced below is an adaptation from thunderbird-helper.sh
which I found at

http://www.wlug.org.nz/MozillaFirefoxNotes

You may want the kind of functionality from a mailto link that Thunderbird
offers, but all I need from a mailto link is an email editor/sender.  I
still use pine (having been using it since way back), but the script
should be adaptable to other MUAs.

So, here's the script (save as pine-helper.sh and make executable; mine's
in /usr/local/bin):

#!/bin/bash

MAILTO=`echo $@ | awk 'BEGIN{FS=":"} $1 ~ /mailto/ {print $2}'`

XTERM="/usr/bin/X11/xterm"
MUA="/usr/bin/pine"

${XTERM} -e ${MUA} ${MAILTO}


Then, to get firefox to use it, in <profile>/user.js, put

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto",  "/usr/local/bin/pine-helper.sh");

(That's all one line.)

It's imperfect ("?subject=whatever" will show up in the address) but
otherwise effective.  (I need to learn a little awk to fix that.)

Patrick

-- 
Patrick Wiseman                               pwiseman@mindspring.com
Linux user #17943                             *Google First, Ask Later*