Getting firefox to hand mailto: links to thunderbird

• Firefox help

I select "use other" and then walkthe filesystem to /usr/bin/thunderbird.

Things that do not work

The first thing which does NOT work is to change the setting of the network.protocol-handler.app.mailto preference. First I use about:config to look at all the preferences and see if this is already set, it is not. Then I find the file prefs.js (which is in the directory /home/user/.mozilla/firefox/sxigwd03.default on my system. I edit that file and add the line:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto","/usr/bin/thunderbird");

network.protocol-handler.expose.mailto         false
network.protocol-handler.external.mailto       true
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.mailto  false

In the process of researching these, I found an mozillaZine article about setting your default mail client.

The process it describes, which also does NOT work is to once again, bring up the about:config page, and right click with the mouse. This brings up a dialog where you select New -> String and enter network.protocol-handler.app.mailto as the name of the preference, and for the value you enter /usr/bin/thunderbird. As recommended I then use File -> Send Link, and get nothing.

Note that typing /usr/bin/thunderbird does work.

Now, lets try yet a third thing, which ultimately does NOT work. You can set the value for the Gnome "Custom Mail Reader" via the Gnome applications menu. I am running xfce, so this won't work for me. What might work is to run the gnome configuration editor (gconf-editor) and it does! I then navigate to /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto and change evolution --component=mail %s to thunderbird %s. Still no dice, hmmmm.