Preferred Applications -> Mail Reader

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Sat, 2010-05-08 at 21:43 +0200, Henrik Frisk wrote:
> On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 4:22 PM, Patrick O'Callaghan
> <pocallaghan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On Fri, 2010-05-07 at 11:28 +0200, Henrik Frisk wrote:
> >> Hi all,
> >>
> >> I've finally gotten around to trying to set up mystem so that clicking
> >> on a mailto link open up a new buffer in emacs (mh-e). By choosing
> >> 'Custom' in the Prefferd Application proferences pane I can add a
> >> command to be run in a terminal. If I start the emacs server (M-x
> >> server-start) I can now remotely create a new message to
> >> to at adddress.com in emacs by running the command:
> >>
> >> $ emacsclient -e '(mh-smail-batch "to at adddress.com")'.
> >>
> >> However, i can't seem to figure out what the variable for the address
> >> is in the Custom option in the Mail Reader preference. I tried %s but
> >> that doesn't seem to work.
> >
> > I know there's a standard for this somewhere. Try
> > "mailto:to at address.com".
> >
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean or maybe I wasn't being clear.

There's an RFC which describes how this should be done. See
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2368.html. I don't know if Emacs obeys it. I
do know that Evolution does obey it, as do a number of other MUAs.

> What I want is to have something like
> 
> emacsclient -e '(mh-smail-batch "%s")'.
> 
> where %s gets substituted for the address that I clicked on somewhere.

Forget about the clicking for now. It's irrelevant to the core of the
question, which is how to specify a target mail address in a standard
way. I can't help you with converting what you click into the right
form. I'm just trying to suggest what the right form might be.

An obvious experiment would be to run the following from the Shell:

emacsclient -e '(mh-smail-batch "mailto:to at address.com")'

> If I put "mailto:to at address.com" that's what I get regardless of what
> I click on. I can see from other scripts (such as this:
> http://xantus.vox.com/library/post/howto-use-gmail-for-mailto-links-linuxubuntu.html)
> that %s should be working but it doesn't for me for some reason.

You'll note that the script you mention converts a mailto: into a form
suitable for Gmail. Since Gmail is browser-based mail client the heavy
lifting is being done by invoking the browser with an appropriate URL.
The detail of invoking Emacs are obviously going to be different from
this, even assuming that Emacs follows the standard (I'm betting it
does, but that's just an opinion).

poc