invoke user's standard mail client

[Cameron Laird]

In article <1178266064.922925.125760 at y80g2000hsf.googlegroups.com>,
luc.saffre at gmail.com <luc.saffre at gmail.com> wrote:
>Hello,
>
>the simplest way to launch the user's standard mail client from a
>Python program is by creating a mailto: URL and launching the
>webbrowser:
>
>def mailto_url(to=None,subject=None,body=None,cc=None):
>    """
>    encodes the content as a mailto link as described on
>    http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2368.html
>    Examples partly taken from
>    http://selfhtml.teamone.de/html/verweise/email.htm
>    """
>    url = "mailto:" + urllib.quote(to.strip(),"@,")
>    sep = "?"
>    if cc:
>        url+= sep + "cc=" + urllib.quote(cc,"@,")
>        sep = "&"
>    if subject:
>        url+= sep + "subject=" + urllib.quote(subject,"")
>        sep = "&"
>    if body:
>        # Also note that line breaks in the body of a message MUST be
>        # encoded with "%0D%0A". (RFC 2368)
>        body="\r\n".join(body.splitlines())
>        url+= sep + "body=" + urllib.quote(body,"")
>        sep = "&"
>    return url
>
>import webbrowser
>url = mailto_url(...)
>webbrowser.open(url,new=1)
>
>(Excerpt from
>http://svn.berlios.de/wsvn/lino/trunk/src/lino/tools/mail.py?op=file&rev=0&sc=0)
>
>But this method is limited: you cannot specify a file to be attached
>to the mail. And I guess that there would be problems if the body text
>is too complex.
>
>Does somebody know about a better method?
>It should be possible at least on Windows, since Acrobat Reader is
>able to do it.
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Portland <URL:
http://ct.enews.eweek.com/rd/cts?d=186-6281-53-799-798304-697089-0-0-0-1 >
is the best standardization of this problem we have under Linux.

I'll address Windows in a subsequent follow-up.