Bug#1112396: dropping nautilus-sendto

[Jeremy Bícha]

On Wed, Nov 12, 2025 at 9:19 AM Alessandro Astone
<alessandro.astone at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> So I did some research on this.
>
> The alternative used in GNOME to send files as email attachments from
> Nautilus is the org.freedesktop.portal.Email desktop portal.
> Unfortunately this uses a non-standard extension to the `mailto:` URI
> protocol to include attachments: an extension that Thunderbird, the
> default mail client in Ubuntu Desktop, does not implement -- not for
> lack of interest but for security concerns:
> https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal-gtk/pull/447#issuecomment-1761589783
>
> Furthermore, if this were to actually work for sandboxed applications
> (which currently it should not), a malicious application could
> effectively read the full host filesystem by just opening `mailto:` URIs
> on itself.
>
> nautilus-sendto itself is a fairly trivial program: it calls a
> client-specific commandline, for every mail client known to it. That of
> course means that it requires continuous maintenance for adding support
> for new mail clients, but on the other hand there is no real standard
> interface available to implement instead.
>
> I think we'll keep using it in Ubuntu Desktop (through a patch in nautilus)

That patch is
https://salsa.debian.org/gnome-team/nautilus/-/blob/ubuntu/latest/debian/patches/ubuntu/nautilus-sendto.patch

Thank you,
Jeremy Bícha