Update 7th of July 2004 - Google changed some minor stuff, which caused this program not to work. I made the minor change required. You can merely replace the handler.exe which was placed into your "Program Files" directory, with the new one (either download from below and unpack, or just grab this direct link (48 kb)).

I recentedly switched to Gmail, which is a webbased mailservice, Google is start to roll out. However, one major annoyance with webmail for me, has always been how mailto: links don't work. You gotta copy paste the address and such, and it's all a big hassle. But I noticed that Gmail's composer window had it's own URL, and therefore I made this simple program. I hope you can make use of it too.

Installation

Should be a total breeze. Just download the zipped files, and then doubleclick the install.bat file.

Then try it out (such as: svend@svendtofte.com), it should work right away. If it does, just delete the downloaded files. You don't need anything else. All the program does, is:

  1. Create a folder in your "Program Files" folder, called "Gmailto".
  2. Put a executable there, which does the actual work. Instead of say, Outlook, handler.exe gets called. It then opens a window, for you to write a email in.
  3. The program has to modify the registry, for it to get the mailto: links. The install.bat does this, by importing the mailto.reg file.

gmailto.zip (21,7 kb) (src, 4kb)

You can build the program using Microsoft's Visual C++ 2003 compiler, which they resently released for free! Feel free to modify, change and use the code however you see fit.

Problems?

If it doesn't work, please email me, and we'll see about fixing those bugs. If you have a mailto: link, which doesn't work correctly, email me the link, and I'll also take a look.

Uninstalling

To uninstall the program, simply delete the Gmailto folder. You'll probably find this in C:\Program Files\. After that, just go to your new preferred email client, and ask it to set itself as the default mail client. All traces from this program will then be gone.

Requests & suggestions

For now, it works fine for me. However, if there are some good suggestions, I'll make them. Currently, various options are in my mind, such as size of compose window, position of compose window. Or perhaps people don't want Internet Explorer firing up, it should be easy making Mozilla fire up instead. And so on.