====== Open "mailto" Links in Thunderbird ======

===== Intro =====
I'm not sure about other distros, but on [[http://gentoo.org|Gentoo]], when you click on a "mailto" link in a web page, it will not open in an //anything// by default.  The purpose of this is to show you how to have it use Thunderbird to open the mailto links.  There is also a sister page going over the similar process to open links in emails that you receive with Thunderbird in Firefox.  That can be found [[apps:thunderbird:openlinks|here]].



===== The Fix =====
You will need to go into your Firefox profile to do this.  In your home directory, you should have a hidden directory named ''.mozilla''.  If you don't have that, you may have something similar like ''.mozilla-firefox'' or ''.firefox''.  Open the ''.mozilla'' directory, and then open the ''firefox'' directory in that.

In the ''firefox'' directory, you should have something similar to this:

<code |ls -l ~/.mozilla/firefox>
$ ls -l
total 13
drwx------ 7 jdeiman jdeiman 1216 May 11 14:41 g8mizwd9.default
-rw------- 1 jdeiman jdeiman 8093 May 11 14:37 pluginreg.dat
-rw-r--r-- 1 jdeiman jdeiman   94 Feb 27 12:25 profiles.ini
</code>

Your default profile directory is the one entitled ''<some characters>.default''.  Open that directory.

Now, all that's left is to create a file called ''user.js'' and put the following line in it (modify appropriately to reflect your path to the thunderbird binary):

<code javascript|~/.mozilla/firefox/g8mizwd9.default/user.js>
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto", "/usr/bin/thunderbird");
</code>

Restart Firefox and you should be all set.

~~DISCUSSION~~