Yet another handy Firefox extension worship session! Surely soon Firefox will take over the world and eradicate all other sources of software.

This time, it's WebMailCompose. The email services you access over the web (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo et al.) are cool in many ways, but they traditionally have quite some limitations compared to desktop clients. Many are being circumvented by wonderous AJAX and other new-skool technologies, but one that can't be controlled by the webmail software itself is the mailto issue.

When you click on a "mailto" link on the web (e.g. this one), what is supposed to happen is that your email client starts up with a partially filled in message ready for you to send. This is much handier than having to note down the email address, start up your mail client and type it in manually. However what tends to happen for webmail users is that Outlook (that you never use) starts up and starts demanding account information. Badness.

There are various solutions, especially tied to particular services. Gmail notifier, Gmail manager and many others for instance fix it for Googlemail such that clicking a mailto link will get you into the Google webmail with a message ready to send. WebMailCompose though is mega flexible, allowing you to access all the major free webmails and indeed services like Horde and Squirrel which it isn't uncommon for your ISP or webhost to offer you as a way of remotely accessing your email - or if they don't, you might be able to install on your server yourself. Go get it and save yourself at least 30 seconds a day. The only downside is that of course being and extension it will only work when you're in Firefox, but hey, why would you ever go out of it?