Opinion
When you click a link in a Web page for emailing someone, a simple piece of HTML code in the link opens your default email software with a new message, and with the recipient’s email address automatically inserted (see figure below). Very handy!
This, however, hasn’t been working with Eudora for a while now. I just ignored it, as my Web browser nicely offers to copy the email address for me, as shown below.
Then I paste the copied email address into the new message in Eudora.
In the Registry
A reader recently asked if there was a way to fix this failing. It turns out that the mailto function is handled through the Windows Registry, and so I began a trek through the murky waters of registry editing. The first thing I learned is that Windows Registry handles mailto’s differently, depending on the version, whether Windows 7, 8, or 10. I am not sure about 11.
Here is one registry key that I found:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open\command
Change its default value to
C:\Program Files (x86)\Qualcomm\Eudora Mail 7\Eudora.exe /m %1
The /m switch starts a new message, and the %1 placeholder specifies the email address.
However, this did not work for me in Windows 7, on which I run Eudora. Another forum suggested Windows 7 needs to be rebooted for the registry change to take effect, but that did not help me.
One forum suggested that as of Windows 8, program names are hashed in the registry, meaning we can’t use plaintext. (Hashed means it is written in a way that we cannot read it; plaintext is written so that we can, such as this paragraph.)
At the Command Line
This is the command-line that gets sent to Eudora to cause it to start a new email with the specified recipient:
"C:\Program Files (x86)\Qualcomm\Eudora Mail 7\eudora.exe" mailto:[email protected]
I found documentation that indicated the /m switch should be used with the email address, but adding it seemed to make no difference. I could find no documentation on Eudora’s command-line switches in Windows; there is documentation for the Linux version, but those command-line switches are named differently.
And that’s as far as I got.
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