Subject: bug#3963: 23.0.94; Emacs on nextstep/Mac OS X should handle mailto: URLs

From: Teemu Likonen <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2009 01:23:47 +0300

On 2009-07-29 15:38 (-0500), Harald Hanche-Olsen wrote:

> + Teemu Likonen <[email-masked]>:
>
>> As you noticed, currently Emacs doesn't handle mailto URLs. Here's my
>> solution for the issue:
>> 
>> http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MailtoHandler
>
> But that requires the use of emacsclient. How do you talk firefox,
> safari, camino, opera, and vienna into running emacsclient in response
> to a user clicking on a mailto: link? The first issue is for emacs to
> actually receive the incoming message requesting the handling of the
> mailto: url. I don't know how that can be accomplished, but note that
> emacs already responds correctly to "open -a emacs filename". I assume
> the basic messaging mechanism must be the same?

I does not require emacsclient. The regular emacs executable has --eval
option too. On that web page there's a shell script. The idea is to
configure it to be the mail client program. It passes the mailto URL to
emacs which then does the rest using the elisp function which was also
on that web page. For example, I have configured my Firefox and my KDE
desktop environment to use that shell script as mail client program.
Works nicely.

Obviously I'd agree that it's better if Emacs did all this automatically
but so far the solution on that web page is probably the easiest and
technically least intrusive -- and uses existing Emacs features as much
as possible.

The url-mailto function which Leo mentioned tries to do many things
manually. It's unnecessary because there's already
rfc2368-parse-mailto-url for splitting the email fields in URLs.