Disabling mailto links (Shallow Thoughts)

Disabling mailto links

Every time I click on a mailto link, Firefox wants to bring up Evolution. That's a fairly reasonable behavior (I'm sure Evolution is configured as the default mailer somewhere on my system even though I've never used it) but it's not what I want, since I have mutt running through a remote connection to another machine and that's where I'd want to send mail. Dismissing the dialog is an annoyance that I keep meaning to find a way around.

But I just learned about two excellent solutions:

First: network.protocol-handler.warn-external.mailto
Set this preference to TRUE (either by going to about:config and searching for mailto, then doubleclicking on the line for this preference, or by editing the config.js or user.js file in your firefox profile) and the next time you click on a mailto link, you'll get a confirmation dialog asking whether you really want to launch an external mailer.

"Ew! Cancelling a dialog every time is nearly as bad as cancelling the Evolution launch!" Never fear: this dialog has a "Don't show me this again" checkbox, so check it and click Cancel and Firefox will remember. From then on, clicks on mailto links will be treated as no-ops.

"But wait! It's going to be confusing having links that do nothing when clicked on. I'm not going to know why that happened!" Happily, there's a solution to that, too: you can set up a custom user style (in your chrome/userContent.css directory) to show a custom icon when you mouse over any mailto link. Shiny!

Tags: tech, web, firefox, mozilla
[ 21:19 Aug 04, 2006    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]