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Comment by SkeuomorphicBee | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this approach is that most people don't have a mail app set up on their computers (I'm guessing on phones it works flawlessly). Pretty much everyone uses a webmail now a days, so "mailto:" links simply don't work for most people, they just open a default mail client which the user doesn't use and never setup. So you end up with a confused user unable to comment.

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I don't see a problem, did you try to use it?

For me it opens "Choose an application to open the mailto link." all listed options open webmail clients.

Given the scenario outlined by the parent comment, this would indeed be a problem on macOS.

Joseph Wood Krutch: "There's nothing like a good bad dirt road to screen out the faintly interested and to invite in the genuinely interested."

Often recast as "bad roads make good filters".

mailto: links open up gmail for me. Not sure when or how I configured this, but it works like a breeze.

Gmail configured it for you. This is implemented as an API[0] that can be called from a site's javascript code, like this:

  navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto", "https://webmail.example.com/handler=%s")



  [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/registerProtocolHandler

Yes! And it is recently - ish new but great!!

I use neomutt, but, if I remove it, `mailto:` links get properly routed to my browser and webmail provider instead. Works on both macOS and Linux.

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