Panther: Creating a new message in Mail by dragging a URL proxy from Safari

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
December 11th, 2003 • 7:54 am

In a nutshell: it doesn’t work.

Normally, if you want to send a new message to someone with an attachment, you can drag the attachment in question from the Finder to the Mail icon in the Dock, and then Mail comes to the foreground with a new message window with the file appended as an attachment.

I often want to write to someone about a particular web site, so I naturally take the URL proxy next to the address in the Address Bar in Safari and drag it onto the Mail icon in the Dock. No cigar. Nothing happens.

I first need to go to Mail, create a new message, then switch back to Safari and drag the proxy onto the body of the new email message’s body in Mail.

I know that I can drag the Safari URL proxy to the Finder to create a “.webloc” file and then drag that “.webloc” file onto the Mail icon in the Dock — but “.webloc” files are no good (AFAIK) if you are writing to someone who’s still using the classic Mac OS or some flavour of Windows.

I’d like to be able to drag the Safari URL proxy icon directly onto the Mail icon in the Dock and get a new message in Mail with the URL already inserted in the body of the message.

Too bad it doesn’t work that way.


6 Responses to “Panther: Creating a new message in Mail by dragging a URL proxy from Safari”

  1. brian w says:

    I remember reading about this issue regarding NetNewsWire, since people naturally try to drag an XML link from Safari onto the NNW icon in the dock in order to subscribe to a feed. It doesn’t do anything. Seems it’s a system-wide limitation of the Dock; it only accepts file & folder drags. The Safari team knows about it; hope the Dock team does, too!

  2. MacDesigner says:

    You could always add this javascript as an address in your bookmarks and place it in the bookmarks bar. I named the bookmark “@” and pasted the script into the address field. It works great for me, when I want to send a URL to someone. It includes the page title and the URL.

    javascript:location.href=’mailto:?SUBJECT=’+document.title+’&BODY=’+document.title+’%5Cn%3C’+escape(location.href)+’%3E’

  3. Pierre Igot says:

    This JS script is brilliant! Many thanks!

  4. Paul Ingraham says:

    Ooooh, nice little workaround. That limitation was driving me slowly bonkers.

  5. MacDesigner says:

    Yes, the script works well. I think I originally found it on Mac OS X Hints.

  6. Ralf-Peter says:

    I’m working with Windows 2000 and received a .webloc file as an email attachment. I deleted the .webloc ending and got a .asp ending. This address didn’t work in my browsers. Then I opened the .asp-file (the .webloc file without .webloc ending) in MS Front Page an let it show as a text file. In the text I could see the original URL.
    Good luck – till next time! R-P M

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