The Server Room

Making mailto: links work in OWA

I recently had one of those moments which I guess all techies have from time to time, where a once small irritation reaches the level where you have to completely obliterate it from existence. In this case, it was accidentally clicking on a mailto: link on a web page. For a number of reasons, here in school everyone uses Outlook Web Access, me included, but the mailto: link always starts up Outlook 2003. I then spend the next minute waiting for it to slowly get its act together so I can shut it down again and get on with my day. I decided to find a way to make mailto: links create a new message in Outlook Web Access instead and after a couple of hours’ work here it is:

You will need:

• A web server which runs ASP pages
• Outlook Web Access for Exchange 2003 (other versions not tested but may work)
• Internet Explorer installed on your clients (doesn’t need to be the default browser)

First, create an empty text document called exchredir.asp and put the exchredir.asp code listing into it. (I’ve had to store the code listing in a Google Notebook, because Wordpress is a complete tart about quoting code) Make sure you edit the text in red to reflect your OWA server’s name; text in green can be customised to suit your setup, but isn’t critical.
Drop exchredir.asp into a new folder on your ASP server where people can get at it, but make sure that you turn off anonymous access to the folder so that the script can pick up their username. To do that go into the IIS management console, find the directory containing exchredir.asp in the treeview on the left, properties > directory security tab > anonymous access and authentication control > edit > untick anonymous access.
Finally, your computer needs to know that mailto: links are opened by our script so we need to register the “URL:MailTo Protocol” filetype in Windows Explorer (Tools > Folder Options > File types).

Use the “Advanced” button to edit the action for “open” so that it reads, including quotes:

“c:\program files\internet explorer\iexplore.exe” http://server/path/exchredir.asp?mailto=%1

which makes the setting for all users of that computer.

For a large number of users you may need to manipulate the registry keys at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Classes\mailto\shell\open\command
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\mailto\shell\open\command

more info here: How to implement a per-user default mail client in Windows XP?

Now try testing a mailto link on a web page, such as the one at the end of the first paragraph of: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ouch/ . It should pop up a new email message in OWA with the To: field filled in for you.

Limitations:

At the moment I don’t know of a way of passing the subject into a new email message in OWA and it may not be possible at all, so I just drop the subject line – you’ll have to type it in yourself.