Comments on: Set Gmail as Default Mail Client in Ubuntu

By: konsumer

konsumer — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:03:17 +0000

bradley: I said that above.

I started using chromium, and this solution will work for whatever you set as your default browser:

gnome-open https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s

By: bradley

bradley — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 07:22:59 +0000

Much simpler solution:
Choose Gmail as the mailto handler in your Firefox Preferences (default option in 9.10 NBR), then set Firefox to be the Ubuntu mail handler (that is, choose Custom and point it to “firefox %s”). Since Firefox is configured to handle mailto: addresses correctly you no longer need a script to do anything messy, plus Firefox can now handle mailto: links on webpages internally without having to call an external script.

To set up Google Apps to work, do these steps –
Go to about:config and toggle this:
gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost

Type this into the address bar and hit enter:
javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler(”mailto”,”https://mail.google.com/a/yourdomain.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s”,”YourDomain.com”)

Then do the same thing as mentioned above.

By: easoukenka

easoukenka — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 04:35:04 +0000

This works so that if you click something that does not have a mailto but just opening your browser “aka mail-notifier” it will just open gmail. This is customized for chromium.

Thank you so much for this!

#!/bin/sh
if [ "$1" = "" ]; then
/usr/bin/chromium-browser –app=http://gmail.com
else
/usr/bin/chromium-browser –app=”https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=`echo $1 | sed ’s/mailto://’`”
fi

By: Jesse

Jesse — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:13:46 +0000

Geek: This is a unnecessarily complicated solution. Simpler solutions in comments above.

By: Marius marais

Marius marais — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 12:33:33 +0000

Using

gnome-open https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s

for GMail, and

gnome-open https://mail.google.com/a/mydomain.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s

for Google Apps mail in the “Command” field will automatically open the default browser and allow Google to parse the mailto link, making things like ?subject=hello!&cc=someone@example.net also work correctly. As a bonus, it also works if you aren’t yet logged in.

By: smaddox

smaddox — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 04:59:38 +0000

I combined the best 2 scripts to get the following script that opens any mailto: in a new tab. Just edit preferences to (ignoring the ’s), and save the following scipt to /home/[user]/mailto.sh:
***
#!/bin/bash
uri=`echo “$1″ | sed -e ’s/subject=/su=/’ -e ’s/^mailto:$[^&?]\+$[?&]\?$.*$$/\1\&\2/’`
firefox -remote “openurl(https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=$uri,new-tab)”
***

Note: be sure to check that the quotations aren’t fudged. When copying from the website to gedit all the quotation marks were changed to some weird unicode ones that don’t function properly.

By: Diego Lima

Diego Lima — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 04:08:32 +0000

Hello,

I improved a bit the script to support multiple ways of opening gmail (firefox new window, firefox tab, opera). Here is my modified version:

#!/bin/sh

#Get our variables from stdin
OPENIN=”${1}”
EMAIL=”${2}”

#See how we want to open gmail
case $OPENIN in
“ffwindow”)CMD=”firefox https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=`echo ${EMAIL} | sed ’s/mailto://’`”;;
“fftab”)CMD=”firefox -remote openurl(https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=`echo ${EMAIL} | sed ’s/mailto://’`,new-tab)”;;
“opera”)CMD=”opera https://mail.google.com/mail?view=cm&tf=0&to=`echo ${EMAIL} | sed ’s/mailto://’`”;;
esac

#Run command
$CMD

By: hmm

hmm — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 23:55:56 +0000

Shouldn’t there be a program that does this?

By: Carpintonto

Carpintonto — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:18:33 +0000

If you are using a window manager whose menu doesn’t work like gnome, the command to load the preferred applications utility is
gnome-default-applications-properties

By: Carpintonto

Carpintonto — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 01:03:47 +0000

The down-loadable script works perfectly on

Linux Mint 7 Gloria – Main Edition \n \l
2.6.28-13-generic #45-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 30 19:49:51 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

with

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1) Gecko/20090716 Linux Mint/7 (Gloria) Shiretoko/3.5.1

1. Download the script, do not copy and paste from this page, and chmod as instructed.
2. In ff Shiretoko/3.5.1 Edit, Preferences, mailto select Use Gmail
3. In ff open a new tab for about:config
4. filter for “network.protocol-handler.external.mailto” (without quotes)
5. right-click the entry and toggle to true.

It will open in a new tab if ff is already open.

Great hack !!
sed doesn’t stumble if there is no “mailto:” in the param

thanks