emacs 23 on OS X: mailto links & calling compose-mail?

Answer 1

I suspect that emacs is failing to find the 'file' it's being told to open. Try a couple things on the command line to see what happens:

emacs mailto:[email protected]

should just open emacs and stare at you blankly.

emacs --eval '(browse-url "mailto:[email protected]")'

should handle the url.

If that all checks out, then you need to wrap things when firefox makes it's invocation (with a script unless FF lets you specify the command line using a %s replacement). Alternatively, you might be able to get things working by setting TRAMP up to understand a mailto: url, but that seems a bit convoluted.

(now that I know what to look for: you might find the EmacsWiki:MailtoHandler helpful.)