Re: OT: Default email client

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

On Fri, 2006-12-15 at 15:09 +0100, Jeffrey Ratcliffe wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> 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.

most desktop environments support an "open" command, followed by a
mailto: URI; this will automatically call the user-defined mail user
agent.  For instance, under GNOME, the command:

  gnome-open mailto:foo bar baz

will automatically open evolution, on the default installation.

under the desktop environments supported by the XDG/Project Portland
initiative, you can use xdg-email instead of gnome-open, which even
allows you to specify the components of the email; make sure to check
which DE are supported on:

  http://portland.freedesktop.org/wiki/

obviously this is not completely platform independent.

if you are targeting another operating system, win32 and osx have their
own API for calling email clients; you should check whether there's a
Perl module covering those APIs.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,  E: ebassi gmail com
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net