Yahoo Mail, Firefox and Vista

Let's say you have a new computer and are using the combination of Yahoo webmail, Firefox and your OS is Vista and you want to be able to click email links on webpages in firefox and have a compose yahoo email page open in a new tab with the proper info from the mailto link you clicked. You'd think this was a pretty straightforward and easy thing to set up. I just spent 3 hours looking for a way to get it to work.

I used to use Yahoo mail. Yahoo used to have a little app that would install and make it so all your clicked mailto links would open their webmail instead of Outlook Express or Windows Mail (vista). Apparently Yahoo doesn't support or distribute that tiny application anymore. They want you to install their Yahoo Instant Messenger in order to be able to click a mailto link and send mail with them... in firefox. Things like this make me glad I switched to gmail way back when.

I went down the path of trying to get Yahoo's old webmail application that I used to do and it was a dead end. If you search you will find a .cab file and can install this thing without problems under XP (right-click->install the .dll file) but it doesn't work so easily in Vista and I didn't want to figure out how to make it work in Vista. It should NOT be this freakin hard so I kept searching.

I eventually found a WebmailCompose add-on for firefox that works with all kinds of webmail providers and mailto links but the extension is gathering dust and won't install in FF 2.0.4. Download v0.6.5 and save it somewhere because who knows if it will still be around for long. The original author's website that most download links point to was a vast wasteland of 404s.

Next you need to get Mr. Tech's local install add-on for FF. Install this first, restart FF, then open the WebmailCompose .xpi file you saved... open it with Firefox of course. You should get a pop-up window from the Local Install add-on. Check off the box that says something about maximizing version compatibility or whatever and it installs just fine in FF 2.0.4. It looks like all of the WebmailCompose add-on's options are present but some of them went beyond the bounds of the options window in Vista. It still works though as far as I can tell.

Credit goes to this link Posted: Oct Thu 12th 2006 6:36pm by Mr. E but I thought I would make a post backing it up just in case that page disappears someday too.