November 2005
Intermediate to advanced
496 pages
11h 9m
English
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Hack #63. Compose Your Mail in Gmail
Make mailto: links open the Gmail compose page.
The Web comprises many kinds of resources: web pages, newsgroups, IRC channels, FTP sites, and so on. Each kind of resource has a scheme, such as the http: in http://mozilla.org or the irc: in irc://irc.mozilla.org/firefox.
You've probably seen mailto: links on contact pages; when you click the link, it launches an external email program.
But what if you use a web mail service such as Gmail? Normally, getting mailto: links to launch a web-based email application is nontrivial. You would basically need to write an external mail program that switched back to your browser and opened the appropriate URL. What a pain! This hack solves the problem another way, by rewriting mailto: links to point to the Gmail Compose page.
The Code
This user script runs on all pages. From a high-level view, it sounds deceptively simple. Just find all the mailto: links, parse them, and replace them with links to Gmail. When you click the link, the browser just redirects to the Gmail Compose page instead of launching a separate application.
Of course, it's not really that simple. The problem is that mailto: links can be complex. RFC 2368, entitled "The mailto URL scheme," specifies the format. The overall structure is mailto:<recipient>?<querystring>, where <querystring> is a list of <name>=<value> pairs separated by ampersands (&). We want to pass these name/value pairs to Gmail, but, of course, Gmail's Compose page uses a different ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.