[Pan-users] Re: Pan not emailing me

[Duncan]

Beartooth <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Wed, 04 Mar 2009
15:53:47 +0000:

> On Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:12:54 +0000, David Shochat wrote:

>> Got it. The key was what Duncan said, prompting me to look up the
>> mailto protocol.

>> [...] Trouble is, you can't do that since pan is going to put the
>> mailto: URL AFTER whatever command you specify in the preferences.
> 
> Probably irrelevant: why urls? Does Pan assume webmail is the
> only kind of mail there is?? For the record, there are some of us who
> detest all forms of it with a purple passion, and never touch any when
> we can manage any other way. That's part of the appeal of Pine/Alpine --
> to me, certainly, and I believe to many others.

URLs don't necessarily mean webmail.  The mailto: protocol is simply a 
standardized way to initiate a mail message in whatever mail client a 
user has configured as their preference.  While I believe it started out 
as a way to invoke the mail client from a URL on a web page, because it's 
standardized and a convenient method for doing so, it's now used for 
standardized invocation of mail clients in all sorts of non-web contexts 
(such as from pan).

It's sort of like MIME, which stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail 
Extensions.  That's how they started, but the standard has now been 
extended and is used far more extensively, including as the basis for 
file associations in both the GNOME and KDE desktop environments.  Want 
to know how Linux avoids required file extensions like Windows uses?  
Take a look at MIME as it certainly has a lot to do with it.

Just as the desktop's knowing what icon and actions to associate with 
unmounted DVDs or thumb drives when they are inserted is based on MIME 
classifications but that no longer has any necessary relation to whether 
you might be attaching the content to a mail or news message, the 
original purpose of MIME, so a desktop's knowing what to do with a 
MAILTO: URL no longer necessarily has anything to do with a web page.  In 
both cases, it's simply the standardized method of dealing with the data 
at hand.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman