xdg-email fails to launch Thunderbird

[Neil Romig]

When clicking "mailto:" links in Chromium, nothing happens. I have Googled around and found that Chromium uses xdg-email for these. I think the problems is the routine "desktop_file_to_binary" which returns empty because the grep for Exec finds three such lines in the file /usr/share/applications/thunderbird.desktop.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.04
Package: xdg-utils 1.1.0~rc1-2ubuntu6
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.2.0-26.41-generic 3.2.19
Uname: Linux 3.2.0-26-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.0.1-0ubuntu8
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Jun 29 13:10:56 2012
Dependencies:

InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 12.04 "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120423)
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: xdg-utils
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Derek L (ddl-lp)]

I also encountered this bug. It affects any program that passes attachments to Thunderbird (I hit it while using DarkTable 1.1 under Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal). See attached patch for a simple fix.

Note that there is a newer version of xdg-utils included in Debian, but it contains other bugs.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

The attachment "xdg-email.patch" of this bug report has been identified as being a patch. The ubuntu-reviewers team has been subscribed to the bug report so that they can review the patch. In the event that this is in fact not a patch you can resolve this situation by removing the tag 'patch' from the bug report and editing the attachment so that it is not flagged as a patch. Additionally, if you are member of the ubuntu-reviewers team please also unsubscribe the team from this bug report.

[This is an automated message performed by a Launchpad user owned by Brian Murray. Please contact him regarding any issues with the action taken in this bug report.]

[Thomas E. Horner (thomas.horner)]

i confirm that adding the patch sending email works again.
for readability i'd like to propose using | head -n 1, tough:

the first change makes sure that only the first occurrence of Exec in thunderbird's desktop file is considered: | head -n 1.
the second change is a fix for what is clearly a bug (having $browser instead of the correct variable $desktop).

diff -u org/xdg-email fixed/xdg-email
--- org/xdg-email 2014-07-16 11:43:48.000000000 +0200
+++ fixed/xdg-email 2014-12-30 17:44:27.990930489 +0100
@@ -321,7 +321,7 @@
         file="$dir/applications/$desktop"
         [ -r "$file" ] || continue
         # Remove any arguments (%F, %f, %U, %u, etc.).
- command="`grep -E "^Exec(\[[^]=]*])?=" "$file" | cut -d= -f 2- | sed -e 's/ .*$//'`"
+ command="`grep -E "^Exec(\[[^]=]*])?=" "$file" | cut -d= -f 2- | sed -e 's/ .*$//' | head -n 1`"
         command="`which "$command"`"
         readlink -f "$command"
         return
@@ -512,7 +512,7 @@
     local client
     local desktop
     desktop=`xdg-mime query default "x-scheme-handler/mailto"`
- client=`desktop_file_to_binary "$browser"`
+ client=`desktop_file_to_binary "$desktop"`
     echo $client | grep thunderbird > /dev/null 2>&1
     if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then
         run_thunderbird "$client" "$1"