Okay, you’ve setup your SUSE Linux system and are ready to use it. Suddenly you’re on a website with something you wish to comment on and you want to send an email. You click on that Contact Us link and….
…nothing happens.
What’s up? Well, your browser needs to know how to handle the link. In Linux there are a number of choices for what eMail client you wish to use. The people who wrote Firefox do not want to choose for you. Here’s how to solve the issue. Open up your browser and type about :config in the address bar. You’ll get a list of items showing all the preferences for Firefox. This is where you will add the information.
There’s a box next to the word, Filter. in that box, type mail. You will get the following screen:
Right-click on a blank area in the screen. You will get a menu. Select New then String.
For the preference name, enter: network.protocol-handler.app.mailto
After you click OK, you can enter the string value you need. This is going to be the executable for your mail application. In my case, I like KMail. Therefore on my SUSE system, I typed in /opt/kde3/bin/kmailservice for the command. If you use something else like Thunderbird, then you might type in /usr/bin/thunderbird for the command.
This will get you the following in your browser:
You now have the ability to send emails from your mail application by clicking on the mailto: links in your Firefox browser. Enjoy!
Many thanks to Testy on alt.os.linux.suse for supplying me with the answer. Some other resources I found on this item while browsing the internet are:
http://opensource.weblogsinc.com/entry/7672458579278871/
http://www.mozilla.org/support/firefox/faq