

Chrome Now Officially Lets You Open All Email Links In Gmail - dotpot
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/open-email-links-directly-in-gmail.html

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driverdan
For those interested the API it's using is navigator.registerProtocolHandler.

<http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/timers.html#custom-handlers>

[http://updates.html5rocks.com/2011/06/Registering-a-
custom-p...](http://updates.html5rocks.com/2011/06/Registering-a-custom-
protocol-handler)

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dchest
This is an odd wording: "Allow ... [No] [Use Gmail]". This may confuse people
who will think that in order to use Gmail, you have to click this button.

Oh, I should submit a bug report instead of posting here.

~~~
pragmatic
The wording is confusing and I had to do a double take and then click on the
help to figure out what its' really wanting to let me know.

"Allow Gmail to open all email links" is terrible wording. It would seem to
the average user that gmail wants to open up all the links in their email.

mailto: is getting less common (due to spambots) and personally I can't
remember the last time I clicked on one of those (that wasn't a web page from
2002).

This will cause a lot of confusion and some tech support calls from
family/friends.

Wouldn't it make more sense to say "Do you want to use Chrome as your default
email client" or something?

~~~
drostie
The whole post is terribly worded. When I heard "email links" I naturally
thought, "links in my email" and not "mailto: pseudo-protocol links." So I was
very confused when it said that "an application on my computer that I never
used would pop up and interrupt me" and that now the links "will open a fresh
Gmail compose window."

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zalew
in FF you just go to preferences <http://i.imgur.com/Nf6hK.png>

~~~
revelation
My, what an intuitive interface! Just add a new "mailto" content-type and link
it to gmail.

Theres so much wrong with this on so many levels. "mailto" isn't a freaking
Content-Type, and this is not the right way to design interfaces.

~~~
throwaway64
a selector pops up the first time you click a mailto: link

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tbassetto
And if you want to open mailto links in Gmail with Firefox (and Opera I
guess): [http://updates.html5rocks.com/2012/02/Getting-Gmail-to-
handl...](http://updates.html5rocks.com/2012/02/Getting-Gmail-to-handle-all-
mailto-links-with-registerProtocolHandler)

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mike-cardwell
On the front page of my website where I display a mailto link, I also have
GMail and Yahoo specific compose links:

"Email: mymailtolink (Compose with GMail/Yahoo)"

<https://grepular.com/>

I wrote some JavaScript code a while back which would automatically detect if
a visitor was logged in to GMail, and would replace all mailto links on my
page with GMail compose links instead. I never put it live on my site though
as the process of detecting if a user is logged in to gmail is pretty dodgy.
In case you're interested in the code, or the detection process:

[https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Pri...](https://grepular.com/Abusing_HTTP_Status_Codes_to_Expose_Private_Information)

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zalew
Interesting experiment, but I don't think webdevs should interfere with what
client should be run by the user to send the email. Mailto: works just fine,
and it's up to the user to set up the client for mailto.

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joejohnson
Google finally incorporates another obvious feature, obviating the need for a
silly chrome add-on. Yay.

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pragmatic
Edit: Mea Culpa. I see this is for desktop links.

I clicked the help last night when this popped up and must have read it
incorrectly.

However, this can still cause problems if you have 2 email clients, say
Outlook for my corporate mail and gmail for my personal mail.

IT departments are going to love this.

~~~
notatoad
If you use gmail, why wouldn't you choose to do this? I'm so sick of mailto:
links opening up whatever useless mail client came preinstalled on whatever
computer I'm using.

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marcusf
A complete aside, but the pushState/client side rendering implementation on
the blog surprised and confused me massively. It seems like the wrong tool for
a blog.

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udp
They could at least have sent the page you're trying to load so that it's
ready to render immediately (instead of having to retrieve it from the server
_after_ the "container" has loaded).

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prodigal_erik
Yeah, whatever they're doing about server-side rendering is just completely
failing, which is really surprising. Gmail works well without js, so it's not
as if they don't have competent web devs.

Smuggling XML in a giant CSS comment is also very … special.

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lucb1e
It took them a while to build that in. So secure and fast, but something as
basic as this (which the competition got since day one) has no priority
apparently.

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thehigherlife
Secure, Fast, and Feature-Complete.

Pick two.

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MatthewPhillips
What other protocols can developers use this new method with?

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RobAtticus
I believe Google Calendar also asks if you want iCal files to be opened in
Google Calendar. I think other sites could register as that protocol handler
as well.

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kevinherron
When I tried this out yesterday with a pinned gmail tab clicking the email
link opened up a _new_ tab and loaded gmail :(

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RobAtticus
Seems that's intentional, even without a pinned gmail tab: "Say yes, and
clicking on email links in any application on your computer will open a
__fresh __Gmail compose window."

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Metapony
Creepy.

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BenoitEssiambre
finally

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angelortega
This really great!

