Re: mailclient-send-it usage of browse-url

[Lennart Borgman <lennart.borgman@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 2:14 AM, Stefan Monnier
<monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:
>> Better, but not good enough IMO since it does not work for web mail
>> and a lot of users might have that.
>
> Maybe it won't quite do the best possible thing, but it does solve the
> main problem: using an interface where the user is likely to send a bug
> report that will just get silently dropped somewhere along the way.
>
> Furthermore, the current code tries mostly to let the "system" figure out
> what MUA to use, so if a user is using webmail as her MUA, then the
> "system" should know about it; and if the "system" can't be told to use
> that webmail system, then it's a problem in the "system".


Yes, it is a system failure, but are we not trying to get around these
here for the purpose of getting the bug reports? I believe the two
step procedure of first displaying a web page and then letting the
user click a mail link there is a little bit more likely to succeed.

I myself has resorted to copy-and-paste when sending bug reports
because of the bad integration with web mail.

Here is how gmail web mail works currently with the best possible w32
system integration (affixa + gmail):

- When "opening" a mailto url affixa catches it and saves it to the
gmail draft folder. And it ask some not very good question first.
- This means there is an empty mail in the draft folder addressed to
bug-gnu-emacs.
- To send the message I have to open the draft folder in the gmail web
interface and then copy the message from the clipboard to it.

Of course I do not do that. I just create a new message from the gmail
web interface.

However even without installing the affixa firefox knows that I am
using gmail. Unfortunately firefox does not care to tell w32 that so
it only works from web pages, not from w32 "open" mailto calls. (That
is why I am suggesting the two step workaround.)