Firefox email

Saturday, 25 September 2004

Email on the Internet has been both fun and exciting while at the same time a bit frustrating. Often times I wonder how I could make the process a little bit easier. Without discussing spam at great lengths, what other ways can I make it more enjoyable? Many websites on the net have email links on them. They are called mailto links… and in the html code they typically look like this:

<a href="mailto://username@domain.com">Click here to email</a>

In the early days of my internet-ting I would just click on the link and my favorite email program of the time would load up. The email address would conveniently be placed inside of the “to:” text area. I would select a subject and away I would type my email.

This ease of use was typical of a pop3 email account. I received mine free with the web service I had while in high school. Shortly after the powers that be, deemed it not the schools business to be a community isp, my pop3 account was lost. I was forever “doomed” to webmail.

Or at least I thought I was doomed. For the longest time when I clicked on an email link, eudora, netscape mail, or outlook express would pop up asking me to set up an account… I thought to myself “ahhhhh! I don’t have pop3 anymore!” So for years I haven’t clicked on an email address. I would copy the link, and paste the, “mailto://username@domain.com” into my Yahoo! webmail account, then delete the “mailto://” nonsense.

Now there are a better ways. Recently I discovered a Firefox extension called WebmailCompose that allowed me to just click the email link, log into my Yahoo email account (this works for Hotmail, Gmail, and a host of others), notice the email address conveniently in the “to:” text area, and start typing away. Moments later I am sending the email.

Convenience is back, with a browser named Mozilla Firefox.