How can I click an e-mail addres in firefox so that it opens a new mail for this recipient in thunderbird?
Problem
On ISG.EE managed workstation I cannot open a mailto-link in firefox to compose the mail in thunderbird. What can I do?
Solution
Crate a directory (if not present) named bin in your homefolder. Change to the newly created directory and create a file firefox-mailto-fix with the following content (Toggle line numbers to copy & paste!):
1 #!/bin/bash
2 # This script allows FireFox to send mailto: links
3 # to Thunderbird
4
5 PATH="/usr/sepp/bin:$PATH"
6
7 THUNDERBIRD="thunderbird"
8 THUNDERBIRD_REMOTE="thunderbird -remote"
9
10 #echo "Firefox mailto: $*" >> $HOME/log.txt
11
12 MAILTO_URL="$1"
13 #Strip off the protocol as this confuses Thunderbird
14 MAIL_DATA=`echo "$MAILTO_URL" | /bin/sed -s 's/^mailto://'`
15
16 if $THUNDERBIRD_REMOTE 'ping()' ; then
17 $THUNDERBIRD_REMOTE "mailto( $MAIL_DATA )"
18 else
19 #The mailto needs to be in the format mailto:someone@example.com
20 #eg not mailto://someone@example.com
21 $THUNDERBIRD -P default -compose "$MAILTO_URL"
22 fi
23 exit 0
Finally make the script you created executable, with chmod u+x firefox-mailto-fix.
Then open firefox and type about:config in the address bar, and create a new key network.protocol-handler.app.mailto with the value /home/$yourusername/bin/firefox-mailto-fix, where you should substitute $yourusername with your unix login name.
Make also sure the settings in the GConf Repository are also set to thunderbird. Open a Shell and enter the following commands
gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/command /usr/sepp/bin/thunderbird "%s" gconftool-2 -g /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/enabled true
If the Settings are different, correct them with the following commands
gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/command '/usr/sepp/bin/thunderbird "%s"' --type string gconftool-2 -s /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/enabled 'true' --type bool