One thing I have noticed in XP is the ability to set Hotmail as my mail program, over Outlook Express and such. And it seems to do this with a DLL called HMMAPI.DLL. Anyone seen an effort to either hack this DLL, or provide a replacement to tie into other web services? I'd love to be able to click on a MailTo link, and have my current PHP based mail program pop up.

Trillian Pro does a rather tricky thing with the Hotmail web site. If you're logged into MSN Instant Messenger, it can monitor your hotmail account and notify you of new messages. And when you click on a new message, it creates a little web page on your hard disk with the necessary Hotmail authentication information embedded and then opens that page in IE. That page opens and then "does the right thing" to connect to the hotmail site without asking you for a login. I'm not exactly sure how they go about doing this, but you might want to look into it, it might give some clues.

In Outllok Express, you go to Preferences and Programs to set which programs should get the "mailto" URLs. I looked around a little in the registry and found where this is defined. The attached file is registry entries which will add another "MyMail" program to this menu.

I guess you can see from the attached file how to call iexplore.exe http://yourserver.com/yournewmail.php3?to=%1

Marius (Escort Cab + Mark II)

and the attachment