Using an external email program with Mozilla 1.0. by Michael Coyle

After months of prodding, I finally convinced Cletus to switch to Mozilla. He wished to continue using Entourage to handle mailto: links. In his pleading letter to me, he begs, "I have never asked you for an edit before. Please find a way to do this!"

I wish I could claim it was so difficult that I pulled-out what little hair I have left, but it's a rather easy modification - if you know where to look!

First, you need to tell the operating system your default email program. In MacOS X, open the System Preferences and select Internet. Under the email tab, select your favorite email program.

In Classic MacOS, Open the Internet Control Panel and similarly select the Email tab and pick your application. In both cases there is no need to enter the server and user name information, just selecting the application is enough.

Next, using your favorite plain-text editor, create a new document titled "user.js" containing one line:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.mailto", true);

Save this file into one of two places. For MacOS X, it goes into your Home/Library/Mozilla/Profiles/default/ZZZZ. (ZZZZ is a Mozilla randomly generated folder name).

You will know you are in the correct folder because it will also contain "prefs.js".

In Classic MacOS, "users.js" gets placed in the Hard Drive's Documents folder, in the Mozilla folder. Work your way down into the Profiles and default folders and place the file in the correct location.

Now when you click an email link in Mozilla, it will launch your email preferred email program and pass along the email address.

Happy Cletus?