Re: Icedove fails to open mailto: links

[Christian Seiler <christian@iwakd.de>]

On 06/20/2015 09:26 PM, Ralph Katz wrote:
> Jessie, xfce, iceweasel preferred browser, icedove preferred mail
> reader, Icedove fails to open mailto: links and iceweasel's Email Link
> with the following error:
> 
> Icedove error message window, titled Close Icedove:
> Icedove is already running, but is not responding. To open a new
> window, you must first close the existing Icedove process, or restart
> your system.
> 
> One instance of icedove is running.
> 
> This problem began several years ago with a thunderbird upgrade, and
> it may come from an unknown legacy prefs setting or whatever that has
> me stumped.  I've since dropped thunderbird for the icedove version.
> 
> Any suggestions for running this down?

First of all, check that the following works from the command line:

icedove mailto:test@example.com

If that does, then icedove works properly. The next thing to check
if if you have set the iceweasel (!) preference
network.protocol-handler.app.mailto
? If so, check what it is. You can remove that setting, it is not
necessary if the MIME associations are configured properly.) Then
check that network.protocol-handler.external.mailto is set properly
in iceweasel (i.e. to true).

If that is all the case, iceweasel will use the standard XDG
mechanism for starting external programs on mailto: links. Then you
can check what the default mailto handler is with xdg-mime:

xdg-mime query default x-scheme-handler/mailto

That will print the name of the .desktop file that controls the app
that is supposed to be called on mailto links. That should ideally
be 'icedove.desktop'. If not, you can set that explicitly via

xdg-mime default icedove.desktop x-scheme-handler/mailto

But then you still have to check that the desktop file is correct.
You can find the system-wide desktop file under
/usr/share/applications/icedove.desktop
It should contain a line
Exec=icedove %u
If so, that's fine.

Then you should check that nothing overrides the .desktop file:

 - system-wide there might be a icedove.desktop in
   /usr/local/share/applications

 - in your home directory there might be a icedove.desktop in
   ~/.local/share/applications

If one of them exists, check that they have the correct Exec= line.

Hope that helps.

Christian