That’s what I like to tell a system when I solve a particularly troublesome problem; sometimes I even pound on my chest. I know: what a geek.
The problem this time had to do with sending e-mail through Outlook 2007 via a third-party application; in this case, the application was FeedDemon. The problem was that when I clicked on the in-application link to forward a post via e-mail, the e-mail was created in plain text — this of course caused a loss of the post’s formatting and pictures which resulted in an ugly e-mail to say the least. What was really annoying was that this worked fine last week and I didn’t change anything (that I know of).
Another reason that this caused me so much anguish is that I’ve experienced this issue before with another RSS feed reader: OnFolio. I never got that fully resolved either. There are two primary commonalities: Outlook 2007 and Internet Explorer 7. The problem never manifests itself with Internet Explorer 6 and goes away if I load Outlook 2003.
After a lot of searching I finally came upon a promising potential fix: the file association for URL:MailTo. Upon investigation, it was missing. Resetting Outlook as the default program did not restore this file association.
I downloaded a reg file to add it back, updated the file to match my configuration, and imported it (contents copied below). Like magic, the send to from FeedDemon produced a pretty HTML message again.
How did the file association get deleted? I have no idea.
Why doesn’t resetting the default program recreate this key? Not a question I can answer.
Would this have fixed my issue with OnFolio? I don’t know because that was at a previous employer.
I am now happy again and can resume spamming my colleagues and friends with “useful” blog posts.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto]
“EditFlags”=hex:02,00,00,00
“URL Protocol”=”"
@=”URL:MailTo Protocol”[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\DefaultIcon]
@=”\”C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Office\\Office12\\OUTLOOK.EXE\”,7″[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open\command]
@=”\”C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft Office\\Office12\\OUTLOOK.EXE\” -c IPM.Note /m \”%1\”"
