Can I make links to email addresses open Gmail instead of Evolution?

You might want to take a look at an application called desktop-webmail

It can be installed by clicking on the little icon next to the link or simply by executing following command:

sudo apt-get install desktop-webmail

Then go to "Applications > Internet > Desktop Webmail" and set your web email service. Finally go to "System > Preferences > Preferred Applications" and under "Mail Reader" set Desktop Webmail as your choice.

Desktop webmail supports following services: Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and Zoho

This could be a solution for other people as well that use other webmail providers.

Hope it helps :)

Oddly, I couldn't find a simple way to do this in Lucid, so I wrote one:

cat ~/bin/mailto
#!/bin/sh
# mailto: a handler for mailto:[email protected] pseudo-uris

case $1 in
    mailto:*)   addr=`echo $1 | sed 's/^mailto://'` ;;
    *)          addr=$1 ;;
esac

url="https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=1&view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=$addr"

# xdg-open suggestion courtesy of andrewsomething@askubuntu
exec xdg-open $url

Followed by a simple change in System ➤ Preferences ➤ Preferred Applications:

It has worked so well that I forgot I even had to write it until this question was asked.

In Firefox:

Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Applications

Select "mailto" in the "Content Type" list. Select "Use Gmail" in the Action list.

If you are using Chrome, the Better Gmail extension will handle mailto links. It also tweaks a few other things about Gmail, but you can turn the rest off on the options page if you like.

A few other options that the extension provides are:

• Hide Invite Friends Field.

• Show Attachment Icons.-

• Adds Row Highlight On Mouse Over.-

• Unread Count in Favicon.-

In Chromium (and I assume Google Chrome as well) 17, it now gives you the option to use gmail as your email client:

And after clicking the "Use Gmail" button:

And it works!

GNOME Gmail will set itself as the preferred application, and also supports attachments (Send File... in Nautilus or LibreOffice). Install the gnome-gmail package.

For Firefox confer to this article on lifehacker:

1. Open Gmail in Firefox.

2. 1. In the tab where Gmail is loaded, copy and paste the following snippet of JavaScript into your address bar:

      javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","GMail")
      

   2. If you are a Google Apps user, use this code instead, but replace example.com with your domain name:

      javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","https://mail.google.com/a/example.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","GMail")
      

3. Firefox 3 will ask permission to add Gmail as default mailto handler. Click the Add Application button, as shown.

Desktop Webmail (package desktop-webmail in the default repositories) should solve the problem.

HI Go to Firefox preferences and click on the Applications icon. scroll down the list to the mailto line and click on the right side of the table to display a drop-down menu. Select the program you wish to use. Cheers

An easy way to do this is to edit your mimeapps.list to make your preferred browser your default email client, then setting up your browser to use your preferred webmail service as the default handler for mailto: links.

Here's how I did it, using Inbox by Gmail as my webmail service and Chrome as my default browser.

1. Edit ~/.local/share/applications/mimeapps.list to include this line:

   x-scheme-handler/mailto=google-chrome.desktop

2. Then in Chrome > Settings > Content Settings > Handlers I selected Inbox as my default email handler.

This works very smoothly even for links from my desktop apps, though it unfortunately doesn't handle attachments.