Ubuntu
sylpheed package

"gnome-open mailto:<email address hidden>" does not work with Sylpheed

Bug #912742 reported by Kentaro on 2012-01-06

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	sylpheed (Ubuntu)	New	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

When you type "gnome-open mailto:<email address hidden>", it is simply ignored (or just launches sylpheed without compose window, if sylpheed was not running).

When I click a "mailto:<email address hidden>" link in a HTML page on Google Chrome, it activates xdg-open with the mailto: URL. xdg-open activates gnome-open (gvfs-open in some environments). My preferred mail client is set to Sylpheed and gnome-open activates sylpheed with the mailto: URL, but no "--compose" option is given.

Let us see /usr/share/applications/sylpheed.desktop. There is an "Exec" entry key and its value is "sylpheed %u". When gnome-open is activated, it simply passes the given URL to sylpheed without "--compose" option. This is the problem. However, we cannot add "--compose" to the Exec key because it will open a compose window anytime.

A simple workaround would be adding a wrapper command that adds "--compose" option if a URL is given.

Revision history for this message

Kentaro (kentarofukuchi) wrote on 2012-01-06:

sylpheed Edit (102 bytes, text/plain)

Here is a script to avoid this issue. You may want to replace the /usr/bin/sylpheed with this script and rename the original binary to sylpheed.real so that there's no need to change the sylpheed.desktop.