[ale] tools: Mozilla & mail

Jim Philips jcphil at mindspring.com
Sat Sep 20 08:28:06 EDT 2003


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I thought this was worth sharing, since some people may not know. For months 
(really years) I maintained Kmail and Netscape Messenger or Mozilla Mail. The 
reason I did this was I really like being able click on a URL in e-mail or 
being able to click on a "mailto:" link on a Web page. But it was hard to 
have the best of both worlds. I couldn't configure Mozilla to call Kmail when 
I click on a "mailto:" link. And I hated the way Kmail called Mozilla when I 
clicked on a URL. If you use Gnome, it's just as bad. Now I've solved both 
problems. The "mailto:" problem is solved by Mozex, a Mozilla extension 
available from mozdev.org. You can tell it to call Kmail when you click on a 
"mailto:" link by using this string:

/usr/local/kde/bin/kmail -s %s -c %c --body %b %a

There is a string for Evolution at the Mozex site. 

The second problem is clicking on a URL inside an e-mail. If you have your 
windowing environment configured to call Mozilla and Mozilla is already open, 
you're screwed, because Mozilla won't open two instances under the same user 
profile. The solution is to configure your windowing environment to call this 
script instead of calling Mozilla directly:

#!/bin/bash
MOZILLA=/usr/local/MozillaFirebird/MozillaFirebird
if ($MOZILLA -remote "ping()"); then
     $MOZILLA -remote "openurl($1, new-tab)"
else
    $MOZILLA $1
fi

Of course, the paths and the program name may be different on your box. What 
this does is to open the site in a new tab in Mozilla or Firebird. I have KDE 
configured to call it like so:

/usr/local/bin/mozscript.sh %u

Now I can run MozillaFirebird and dump the huge Mozilla suite and I have 
seamless use of "mailto:" in the browser and URL's in Kmail. 
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