Question about Preferred Applications

[Bryn M. Reeves]

On 08/19/2012 08:57 PM, Joe Zeff wrote:
> My sister uses Linux, and has Thunderbird installed.  However, her 
> primary email address is at gmail.  She'd like to be able to click on 
> mailto: links and have gmail come up instead of Thunderbird.  AFAICT, 
> there's no obvious way to do it.  Does anybody out there know how that 
> could be automated?  (My sister isn't technically oriented; something 
> that takes several steps every time probably won't work.  However, I can 
> either set it up for her or talk her through doing it, as long as the 
> end result is easy for her to use.)
> 

You can create a new menu item for your browser (either manually or
using alacarte) that handles the correct mime types for mail and adds
the correct gmail URL to the command. I don't know how gmail's URL
schemes work but you may need a wrapper script to munge it somehow (it
looks like the requested URL is passed in as %u in the desktop files).

Put it in '.local/share/applications' for a single user or
'/usr/share/applications' to make it available to all users.

Will probably take some fiddling to get it working right but I use this
to run gnome-terminals with specific command line options.

You probably want at least these two:

MimeType=message/rfc822;x-scheme-handler/mailto;


Categories=Network;Email;

This is the .desktop I use for the terminal: http://fpaste.org/OIBt/

Regards,
Bryn.