email popup functionality/formatting

[aschweigert]

Reported by Midwest Energy but I've heard similar complaints from other sites as well...

So, when clicking on the "email" link in either the sticky footer, article social tools box or author profiles you get a popup window that is usually empty because (on macs anyway) Apple hijacks mailto links and tries to force you to use Apple mail (I'm sure you can change this, but this is the default).

When the link gets hijacked the popup remains open and the formatting of the subject line and body of the email are weird (all words are + separated for some reason). We also pass a junk "TO:" address and could probably just leave this blank.

Let's take a closer look at this functionality in a number of contexts and see what we can do to improve it.

[aschweigert]

this may no longer be an issue?

[benlk]

We still pass the friend@example.com address, but everything else is properly escaped.

If your browser is set up use an external program to handle mailto: links, then those may be passed to the external program. My computer is configured to use Chrome to open them, and so all major browsers will pass the URL to Chrome, which opens Gmail.

The opened page has no actual content; it's essentially about:blank or chrome://newtab. I'm not sure if the parent page can close it or not; @rnagle might know better.

[benlk]

We may actually get around the new popup by doing away with the Javascript altogether, and using a plain mailto: link in the social button.

Such a change would need to be propagated across all the places we have a custom largo_post_social_buttons or equivalent, like MWEN's custom ones.

[aschweigert]

That seems like an ok solution to me, not sure why we'd need js here anyway...was that just a holdover from previous versions of the sharing tools (sticky footer, etc.)?

[benlk]

I'm not sure when we introduced it. It's definitely been around since 0.4, though.

[rclations]

• Remove friend@example.com from the to: address (Remove friend@example.com from mailto links #1192)
• Replace the + between words with spaces (Social Sharing: Move mailto functionality from js to html #1281)
• Move the mailto: link to plain old html instead of JS (Social Sharing: Move mailto functionality from js to html #1281)

[benlk]

The mailto: link work can probably be copied from https://github.com/nprds/editorial-wp-site/pull/8/files#diff-72b7bed1a6509fa97cf13808c32678aaR93