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thunderbird puts a hidden "mailto:" line into every email address I put in the body of my message. It screws up the end processor on the mail server I maintain

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  • 1 has this problem
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  • Last reply by dropmenu

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I maintain a club email list by sending plain text commands to it such as:

subscribe members willy@yahoo.com

(If you're old enough you'll have an idea of what the web master is still using).

Thunderbird has started attaching an invisible "mailto:" in front of each of the email addresses in my commands and the remote server rejects them. I see these as hot-links in my outgoing sent mail folder.

I have turned off HTML processing and tried to send text only but the hot links are still there in my sent box copy of the plain text message.

I POP my mail for a reason, more so than just my own convenience.

What is going on?

-russest

I maintain a club email list by sending plain text commands to it such as: subscribe members willy@yahoo.com (If you're old enough you'll have an idea of what the web master is still using). Thunderbird has started attaching an invisible "mailto:" in front of each of the email addresses in my commands and the remote server rejects them. I see these as hot-links in my outgoing sent mail folder. I have turned off HTML processing and tried to send text only but the hot links are still there in my sent box copy of the plain text message. I POP my mail for a reason, more so than just my own convenience. What is going on? -russest

Chosen solution

Use ctrl+u to see the message source. I think you'll find no sign of the mailto: in the source, which means it's being added to display the link to you. Since this is internal and private to Thunderbird (unless you can prove it's really in the message source) then I can't see how it affects your server. Your server isn't looking at Thunderbird, is it?

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"I have turned off HTML processing" - what does that mean?

I've never seen a mailto: in plaintext. I've just sent myself a plain text (from Thunderbird, to Thunderbird) message and it arrives with a plain email address; no mailto:

Yes, I've checked in the message source too.

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Thunderbird allows you to disable HTML composition, which is where I thought this was occurring (see image).

When I emailed myself plain-text email addresses in the body of the email, they would arrive with the address portions within the message body highlighted in blue and hot linked. If you hover the mouse over them, a link shows up in the lower left corner of the mail window showing the "mailto:" tag prefixed to the email address even though it is not visible in the message body.

I found no settings within Thunderbird that would allow me to turn this off and, unless this is an "undocumented feature" of the program, it is incredibly difficult to understand why this is happening or if this is the cause of the problem I'm having with maintaining the web mail server data base.

In a fit of revenge, last night the server manager program, "majordomo", stopped speaking to me at all. The web master is on the same domain so I don't know if I accidentally killed the host or he just hasn't responded to my emails about this problem yet (he has a day job and a life).

-russest

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Seçilmiş Həll

Use ctrl+u to see the message source. I think you'll find no sign of the mailto: in the source, which means it's being added to display the link to you. Since this is internal and private to Thunderbird (unless you can prove it's really in the message source) then I can't see how it affects your server. Your server isn't looking at Thunderbird, is it?

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Thank you for that very enlightening tip (CTRL-U), Zenos.

I don't know what majordomo is looking at but if the web master ever contacts me I will try to find out.

The outgoing messages which have email addresses in their body do not get highlighted and CTRL-U does not seem to work in the composition field, anyway, but my sent mail folder shows the raw text when using CTRL-U, as you pointed out.

I will have to consider this a closed issue.

Perhaps it was an artifact of the addresses being copied from an Excel cell? ... but I usually bounce such things through Notebook to strip out everything but ASCII anyway.

I'll see if my web master has any clues.

My sincere thanks for everyone's comments.

-Russest

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Tbird keeps adding "mailto:" to an outgoing gmail address - and the mail is promptly rejected by the recipient server