Mailto: links in a multi-user environment

[Huw Wyn Jones]

Hi folks,

I'm a new sys admin in an FE college in Wales We use Zimbra for staff email and Gmail for students. Firefox is our standard browser. The only complaint we get from staff about the current set-up is that clicking on mailto: links in webpages doesn't bring up a 'compose' page in Zimbra.

Googling hasn't come up with a solution. Zimbra Desktop, Toaster etc. don't appear to work in multi-user environments and there is no way (yet) to change the behaviour of Firefox to be Zimbra friendly. Has anyone got an answer to this issue? I'm sure we're not the only college with this problem.

TIA

Huw

[Huw Wyn Jones]

Any suggestions?

[bdial]

i think if you install the zimbra toaster it can handle mailto redirects

[Huw Wyn Jones]

I'm sure it can. But can it do it in a multi-user environment? Another posting here said that that feature will be implemented 'after version 1.0' of Toaster.

[bdial]

oh I see. Currently I don't think you can but you should be able to soon. Basically in firefox you can modify the way it handles mailto: links as explained here

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Web...tocol_handlers . The only problem is that currently if you set this up for zimbra it passes the whole mailto:address portion into the to: field. Zimbra does not currently parse this correctly to remove the mailto: portion, but apparently it will in 5.0.19

Bug 39239 – Mailto: link arguments not parsed

[Josef]

For firefox you can install this extension:

Mailto Links and Zimbra [How to] - Zomgee

The only flaw is that the new line, new paragraph mark for "body=blabla" does not work

Should be something like taking this '%0%A' and replacing by something Zimbra's message pane knows how to interpret

Anybody knows how to fix it?

[bdial]

firefox has built in support for this now and it's a lot easier

support for Firefox 3 mailto protocol handler?

[Rich Graves]

The built-in protocol handler broke for me and others with Firefox 3.6. If it works reliably for you with 3.6.x and 4.x, I'll take another look.

On Macs I suggest Webmailer and on PCs put explorer "https://mail.carleton.edu/zimbra/?view=compose&to=%1" in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open\command (unfortunately requires admin rights).

The advantage of handling mailto: at the OS level is that it will work across browsers, and often (but not alway) in email programs.

To deal with the Windows "Send file to..." shell extension and a few other things, you'll need a purpose-build application.

[Josef]

The only registry hack that works for me (WinXP) is this (save to txt with .reg extension):

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail\Zimbra Web Client\shell\open\command]
@="rundll32.exe url.dll,FileProtocolHandler https://FQDN/zimbra/"

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\mailto\shell\op en\command]
@="rundll32.exe url.dll,FileProtocolHandler https://FQDN/?view=compose&to=%1"

Unfortunately this does not handle correctly CC, BCC, Subject, Body tags of mailto, hence my recomendation to build your own extension for firefox like explained in the link above.

I'd still need some help with the problem described, which is inserting blank lines into the message body.

Thanks!

[Josef]

I'm updating on myself. Is this a bug in the Ajax interface? The html interface interprets correctly the line breaks "%0A%0A"

examples: (replace FQDN by your own address)
Ajax:
https://FQDN.com/?view=compose&to=ac...aragraph%0A%0A

HTML:
https://FQDN.com/h/search?action=com...aragraph%0A%0A

Should I submit a bug report?