Mailto link open in new tab only if web mail client

Question

I have a web page that creates a list of contacts and their email addresses. You have two options for the mailto link, (1) open it in the current window or (2) open it in a new tab/window.

I see potential drawbacks from both sides:

For web mail clients (eg gmail) option 1 is not ideal because it hijacks the window then, and the user must navigate back to the application in some fashion
For desktop mail clients, the first option is not ideal because now you have a blank window/tab left open

Is there anyway to "detect" if the opened webpage has content and close it if not?

Based on this link:

Detecting web-based mail client vs local mail client for a mailto link

I tried the following to get the body :

const windowRef = window.open(`mailto:${email}`, '_blank')
const body = windowRef.document.body

The problem I was running into was that the body of each document was empty: <body></body>

I assume this was because it didn't have enough time to load the page, so I attempted to setTimeout but then I got a Blocked a frame with origin "myhostman" from accessing a cross-origin frame.

Any ideas on a way to support both web and desktop mail clients without the drawbacks listed above?

Answer 1

This is pretty kludgy, but it might do what you need:

You can have a SendEmail() function defined like this:

 
 
 
  
  function SendEmail() { const windowRef = window.open(`mailto:email@address.com`, '_blank'); windowRef.focus(); windowRef.onfocus = function() { return; } setTimeout(function(){ windowRef.close(); },500); }

and your html looks something like this:

<a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="SendEmail();">email</a>

The idea behind this is that, if your user has a webmail as their default email client, then the function will just exit; however, if the user has a desktop email client, the new window will lose focus triggering the setTimeout() closing the new opened window.

My test works well using this JSFiddle but is "half" tested, I mean, since I don't have a webmail client set as my default client, I can't confirm this will actually work as you want, however I can confirm that the window closed when my desktop email client opened...

UPDATE:

Forget the function above, I slightly modified it to this:

function SendEmail() {
  const windowRef = window.open(`mailto:email@address.com`, '_blank');

  windowRef.focus();

  setTimeout(function(){
    if(!windowRef.document.hasFocus()) {
        windowRef.close();
    }
  }, 500);

}

I tested this in Firefox by setting Gmail and Yahoo! as my default email clients, and the new opened tab remained opened; then I changed it back to my desktop email client, and the new opened tab closed. I did the same test using Vivaldi, and IE Edge (where my desktop client is set as the default one), and the results were successfully the same. Here's the updated JSFiddle .

Mailto link open in new tab only if web mail client

Question

1 answers

solution1
6 ACCPTED 2017-07-27 21:24:52

Mailto link open in new tab only if web mail client

Question

1 answers

solution1 6 ACCPTED 2017-07-27 21:24:52

solution1
6 ACCPTED 2017-07-27 21:24:52