Odd behaviour from revMail, why?

[J. Landman Gay]

Peter Alcibiades wrote:
> I got the attached from the dictionary, cut and pasted it, and only changed it 
> to make Field1 a real reference to a real field on the test card.  When I use 
> it, the first thing that happens is Firefox opens.  Then Kmail opens.  It 
> shows help at example.com as the address, but nothing else is put into either 
> subject or body.
> 
> I was expecting to see Help! appear in the subject, and the contents of Field1 
> to appear in the body, and for only Kmail to open.  Isn't this what is 
> supposed to happen?  Putting in a literal string in place of field has no 
> effect either.
> 
> Does revMail do this on Mac or XP?

It's different on every platform and email client; I get different 
results depending on what app opens and what OS I'm running. But I think 
you should enter the above into a bug report, mainly because I don't 
think the revMail handler is written correctly for Linux. Now would be a 
good time to report it, since the team is working on the next Linux 
release right now.

The revMail command doesn't really mail anything itself; instead it sets 
up url-encoded text for the address, body, and other components of an 
email. Then it passes the data to the revGoURL command.

The revGoURL command does the actual handling of the email. On Macs, it 
sends an applescript and the Mac OS decides which app to launch (which 
it does correctly.) Mail gets opened in the user's default email client 
and URLs go to a browser. On Windows the handler figures out whether its 
an email or a web link and uses "launch" to open the right app, which it 
determines by reading the registry. However, on Linux there is very 
little handling done at all. RevGoURL just sends the URL to a browser, 
which then handles the email request itself by opening your mail client. 
That's why you see the browser appear first. I suspect the browser is 
ignoring the extra parameters and is only sending the first one -- the 
email address.

The revGoURL command needs to be rewritten to specifically accomodate 
email requests on Linux. That's the part to report as a bug.

-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com