chrisbray.co.uk

I use Gmail as my main email account I thought it'd be real nice to be able to get Gnome to launch Gmail in my default browser when I pressed the email button on the toolbar. Well, a bit of googling and here's the answer.

Create a script with the following content in /opt/gmail-integration/sendmail, chmod it 755 and chown it root:root

#!/bin/sh
# gnome-gmail - a script that passes gnome mailto links to gmail in your browser
# Copyright (c) 2006 Matthew C Ruschmann
# Version: 1.0
BROWSER=`gconftool-2 --get '/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http/command' | cut -f1 -d' ' `
if test -z "${*}"
then
${BROWSER} "http://www.gmail.com"
exit
fi
TOMAIL=`echo "${*}" | sed -e 's/mailto://g'`
TOMAIL=`echo "$TOMAIL" | sed -e 's/?/\&/g'`
TOMAIL=`echo "$TOMAIL" | sed -e 's/&subject=/\&su=/g'`
TOURL="https://gmail.google.com/gmail?view=cm&cmid=0&fs=1&to="
echo ${BROWSER} "${TOURL}${TOMAIL}"
${BROWSER} "${TOURL}${TOMAIL}"

Register it as the default email handler, and turn off the un-required console window with the following code at the console...

gconftool-2 --set --type string /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/command "/opt/gmail-integration/sendmail %s"
gconftool-2 --set --type bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/need-terminal false
gconftool-2 --set --type bool /desktop/gnome/url-handlers/mailto/enabled true

If you're scared of the command line you can go to System -> Preferences -> Personal -> Preferred Applications and it's listed in there in the GUI.

But there you go, clicking on the "Email" button will now launch your browser and load Gmail.
It also works for "mailto" links for emailing people from web pages.