Using External Mailto Links in Firefox with Mutt and Pine

It's a fairly simple issue to setup Firefox with your MUA in Microsoft
Windows, be it Outlook Express, Outlook, Thunderbird, whatever. But,
with older text type email programs in BSD and Linux, it's a bit harder.

I got tired of forgetting not to click mailto links in Firefox. You
always get the same old message about no program being associated with
mailto. I don't have any fancyX-Windows email programs. Just mutt on one
box and pine on the really old box. In both cases I'm very satisfied
with what they can do along with a little extra I always manage to milk
out of them, tinkering and tweaking. I had put off for a long, long
time, figuring out how to fix Firefox and the mailto links thing, but I
finally managed to stop goofing off long enough to come up with working 
solution.

Script to call pine to send mail to mailto links in Firefox. Name it
whatever you want.  I named mine ffpine.sh.


      #!/bin/sh xterm -e pine ${1:+-url "$1"}


Script to call mutt to send mail to mailto links in Firefox. I named
mine ffmutt.sh.


      #!/bin/sh xterm -e mutt -F $HOME/.ffmuttrc "$1"


Remember to do chmod +x scriptname or, if you want to make sure it's
only executable by yourself, chmod 0700 scriptname.

I had to copy .muttrc to a new name so I wouldn't be calling my usual
mail script which uses a different signature routine calling fortune to
plug in a random fortune file. So, I just copied .muttrc to .ffmuttrc
(ff=Firefox), .signature to .ffsignature, and, in .ffmuttrc, set the
signature like so:


      set signature="~/.ffsignature"  # file which contains my
      signature


In both instances, with mutt and pine, I made the same changes in
Firefox. In the URL bar, type about:config and when the page opens, type
in mailto. Set your settings like so:


Preference Name StatusTypeValue
network.protocol-handler.app.mailtousersetstringpath_to_script
network.protocol-handler.expose.maitousersetbooleanfalse
network.protocol-handler.external.mailtodefaultbooleantrue
network.protocol-handler-handler.warn-external.mailtousersetbooleantrue


On the one box, I had to create the 'network.protocol-handler.app.mailto'
line.  I guess it varies from one install to another. Don't know. I just
know the above settings work perfectly with the scripts. So, good luck with
it.