The problem:
| GSendMail |
This is a simple standalone mail composition tool for Unix. It lets you fill in From, To, CC, and Subject, and compose a text/plain message in a fixed-width text area with word-wrap. It does a fair amount of sanity checking, but other than that, it is frill-free: no HTML, no attachments, no address book.
The problem:
If you install Firefox, or a web-browser-only version of Mozilla (that is, not the "Communicator" version, which includes the mail reader) then you cannot click on mailto: links in web pages.
This is, of course, crazy, since mailto: links have been supported in all previous web browsers that were not also mail readers, including, but not limited to, Netscape 1.0 and NCSA Mosaic.
When I learned that they were planning on doing this crazy thing, back in like 1997, I tried to talk them out of it, but it was no use. ``Making that work would be too hard,'' they said. Apparently it remained too hard for the next 8+ years. It's shit like this that makes me glad to be out of there.
The Solution:
First, get Firefox, or Mozilla 1.6 or newer. There's no way to do this in any older release of Mozilla.
Next, install this program, gsendmail. Here it is as a gzipped tar file:
It requires GNOME 1.0 and GTK 1.2, or newer. Build it like so:
Then you need to tell Mozilla to invoke gsendmail any time a mailto: URL is loaded. You do this by adding a couple of lines to the the user.js file deep under your Mozilla directory. That file may not exist already, but there should be a directory with a name something like ~/.mozilla/default/pm82dm6t.slt/ that has a bunch of files in it; user.js goes there, and these lines go in it: If you're using Firefox, it will be called something like ~/.mozilla/firefox/pm82dm6t.default/ instead.
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.mailto", "true");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto", "gsendmail");
Restart Mozilla, click on mailto: links, and enjoy!
If that doesn't work, then maybe Mozilla is already configured to hand mailto: URLs to GNOME, via the gnome-moz-remote program. If mailto: URLs launch Evolution, that's probably what's going on. In that case, you need to tell GNOME to use gsendmail for mailto: as well.
In Gnome 2.2 - 2.6: run gnome-file-types-properties. Under "Internet Services", select "Electronic mail transmission", "Edit", and replace evolution with gsendmail. That will write the file ~/.gnome/application-info/user.applications.
In Gnome 2.8: run
gnome-default-applications-properties.
Under "Mail Reader", select
"Custom Mail Reader", and type
You can verify the setting by running: