Re: OT: Default email client

[Jaap Karssenberg <j g karssenberg student utwente nl>]

Jeffrey Ratcliffe wrote:
> Apologies for the fact that this is some way off topic, but I can't
> find the answer via Google:
>
> A user has requested the option to send the PDF output produced by my
> Gtk2-Perl application using the default email client.
>
> Is there any way of digging out, firstly which desktop is being used,
> and then which is the default email client? Then presumably each
> client has its own (if at all) command line options for composing a
> blank email with an attachment.
>
> Or is it all much easier?

There is ongoing discussion in the freedesktop.org mailing list on 
configuring standard applications, like the email client. However there 
is no standard for this yet.

The easiest to do is to have the user specify the command. Prompt for 
the command the first time the user uses the feature and put it 
somewhere in your program settings.

Most email clients can "open" a mailto: url. Attaching a file to this is 
quite difficult to do in a general way. You might need to resort to 
doing the multipart-mime encoding yourself and supply the whole base64 
encoded content as mailto: url. This is not something you want to do if 
you can avoid it.

Regards,

-- Jaap