mailto links use Yahoo Compose
When I click a mailto link it brings up the GMail app. Instead I want the Yahoo Compose window. Several posts suggest various arcane methods. Either they do not apply or they require hacking. Has the situation improved?
How can I make mailto links go to the Compose window on mail.yahoo.com?
All Replies (8)
None of the advice in this answer relates to reality.
In the section "Setting the mail client used by Firefox" it shows half a dozen options for "mailto". But when I look all I find are "Always Ask", "Use Firefox (default)", and "Use Other ...". None of these helps.
Section "Setting your operating system's default mail program" suggests "Click the icon under the heading Email to show your choices." The only choice I get is FireFox.
The third section suggests "webmail client" but I just want to use Yahoo mail. It is not clear what a webmail client IS.
Webmail = email website, so that would be the relevant one.
If you didn't want to use an add-on, you face two problems:
(1) Determining the proper URL for composing a new message.
For Yahoo, you can test whether this still works:
https://compose.mail.yahoo.com/mrd/mailto:bob@example.com
(Template form: "https://compose.mail.yahoo.com/mrd/%s")
(2) Adding the URL (in template form) to Firefox
There isn't a straightforward interface for this. The URL will end up in the handlers.json file, but the old tricks for getting Firefox to add it haven't been working as well in recent years. I can try to find a new method (but probably not today).
Yes, the compose.mail.yahoo.com link works just fine. Is that a webmail link, or is the webmail link mail.yahoo.com?
> (but probably not today)
It took me a while to get around to posting the issue, so another couple of days or weeks is not a problem. Should I post the problem to Bugzilla?
Fred Hansen
So one way to add a new mailto destination, also called a URI handler, without installing an add-on, is to run a script in Firefox's Browser Console, one of the developer tools. This requires a settings change to switch the console from read only to read/write. Because scripts run in the console can use interfaces that are totally illegal for web pages to use, you definitely need to be very careful about what scripts you run so that you don't infect your browser.
I posted the script here: https://gist.github.com/jscher2000/8a9112b1c03af77f6b3b63b1296bd864
Note that you can also add a handler via Policies (policies.json file).
Yes, the two previous replies will probably work. And I ran across them during my initial search. They are among the solutionsI described in the original post as, "they require hacking." There needs to be a method for mere mortals.
Either hack now, or wait until Yahoo adds a tag to their pages telling Firefox what to add, like Microsoft does:
