This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

And this is Using Thunderbird as default client on Ubuntu, written , and concerning Howtos, Linux

For my sins, I installed Evolution in the past. I don’t use it; I use Thunderbird. But clicking a mailto link in Firefox starts up Evo. Big no-no. So, I had a poke around. In Computer | Desktop Preferences | Preferred Applications you can choose Mail Reader to configure your default mail reader. TB doesn’t seem to show up in the dropdown, so I thought I’d bang it into Custom Mail Reader. So, what do you put in? I’d have thought mozilla-thunderbird %s. Nope. That doesn’t work. Moreover, if you try that from the command-line: 
mozilla-thunderbird someone@example.org
/usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/mozilla-thunderbird-xremote-client: Error: Failed to send command: 509 internal error
That’s no good. On the other hand, what’s a mozilla-thunderbird-xremote-client? 
/usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/mozilla-thunderbird-xremote-client someone@example.org
/usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/mozilla-thunderbird-xremote-client: Error: Failed to send command: 500 command not parsable: someone@example.org
Ah, “command not parsable“. It must take the -remote commands. 
/usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/mozilla-thunderbird-xremote-client "mailto(someone@example.org)"
That works! Yay! So, let’s try that in the Custom Mail Reader box in Preferred Applications. Nope. Dammit. It pops up a mail window, no problem…with “%s” in the To box. Dammit. Any suggestions?

Comments

Peter J.

You’ve tried Edit|Preferences|General Settings|Check to see if Thunderbird is default for Mail/News? I believe it works for recent GNOME desktops… does for mine, anyway!

Alternatively, what about using a script like

#!/bin/sh
/usr/lib/mozilla-thunderbird/mozilla-thunderbird-xremote-client "mailto($1)"

and setting that as your custom mail reader? (I’m not sure how to make Textile ignore those – characters.)

(Hmm, your “live preview” appears to be off by one char in Firefox 1.0 under Linux, i.e. it’s not showing the last char typed until/unless I do another keypress afterwards.)

Joshua Hore

I was able to get it to work by just putting @/home/josh/thunderbird/thunderbird %s@ in the Preferred Applications box (obviously the path would be different). This didn’t work from the command line, but works from Firefox. What version of Thunderbird are you using? Because in v1.0 the executable seems to just be call thunderbird rather than mozilla-thunderbird.

sil

I’m using 0.8 because that’s what’s in Ubuntu Linux (the warty release). Yes, I know it should be newer…

Joshua Hore

It’s strange that the Repositories haven’t been updated to the latest versions of Thunderbird and Firefox. I guess they have to ensure compatibility first or something. I downloaded 1.0 from the Mozilla site and it works fine – I’m not a big e-mailer, though.

sil

Joshua: warty is the “stable” release of Ubuntu. If I want the more up-to-date software then I need to upgrade to the unstable version, hoary…but I’m avoiding that at the moment in case it’s too unstable…

Paul Freeman

Here’s a question from someone who is not the best informed at this Debian stuff.

I know that installing non-standard packages isn’t the best idea, but is there anything “wrong” with installing Thunderbird 1.0 from source?

sil

Not really. It does mean that Debian doesn’t know it’s there, so packages that depend on it being there will install the Debian version and ignore the fact that you already have it installed. (For example, if you install mozilla-thunderbird-enigmail to get GPG support, it’ll install the Debian-packaged TB.) I personally don’t like installing Debian-packaged stuff in any way other than with the Debian package, but obviously this leaves you a bit stymied if you want the latest upstream version. Hoary should be up to date, and it’s possible that there’s a backport of some hoary packages to warty (I believe you’re using Ubuntu, yes?)

sil

I was right. There are backports of Ubuntu hoary packages to Ubuntu warty: see http://ubuntu-bp.sourceforge.net/ for details. Thunderbird 1.0 is not yet ready for mainline use (it’s not in warty-backports, it’s in warty-backports-staging, so that package testers can use it) but it is there if you want the test version and it will be in the main backports repository soon.

helpgod

dunno if this helps, there are debian packages avaiable for 1.0 at http://www.jwsdot.com/debian.

With 1.0 you can use mozilla-thunderbird %s in the default mail reader settings of gnome. A detailed description on howto make thunderbird the default reader is on http://www.jwsdot.com/debian/faq.html.

For versions smaller then 0.9-6 read the old faq!

Wawet76

Thunderbird 1.0 is now in http://ubuntu-bp.sourceforge.net/

sil

Wawet76: installing now. Thanks!

Joris
  1. GNOME (Unix/Linux): Open the Control Panel. Go to Document Handlers | URL Handlers. Put mailto in the left text field, and gnome-moz-remote “%s” in the right one. Then put the following text in ~/.gnome/gnome-moz-remote (create the file if it does not exist): [Mozilla] filename=absolute path of Thunderbird install directory/mozilla

http://www.mozilla.org/support/thunderbird/faq#q2.1

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