After the landing of bug 226890 clicking on a news link example: news://news.mozilla.org:119/lJGdnWgY2eWzCanQnZ2dnUVZ_tydnZ2d@mozilla.org Results in a mail composition window with the contents of the target message as an .htm attachment. My guess is that the links are being detected as mailto uri's Expected result: The newsgroup should just open, with the message displayed.

Error console after composition window opens: Error: '<error>' when calling method: [nsIContentHandler::handleContent] = <unknown>

I've been unable to confirm this on Linux...

Windows XP SP3 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0 I have seen this in Thunderbird 8, selecting a news: URI contained in the body of a newsgroup message. Actually, I found this bug report when preparing to submit a new bug report on the same problem. On the other hand, selecting a news: URI on a Web page in SeaMonkey displays the message in SeaMonkey and not in Thunderbird. (I don't use SeaMonkey as a newsreader; I use it only as a browser.) That would be a different (new?) bug report. Is comment #2 the result of selecting a news: URI via a browser and not via Thunderbird?

Thunderbird 8 does not contain the enhancements in bug 226890 That bugs should allow newsgroup links to work (in TB11) What I have just now discovered that, in fact some links work after I manually set TB as my default newsreader via Control Panel>>Internet options.(Winxp) Some (probably malformed) news url's still open in a composition window, and I have yet to get a news link in the browser (Firefox) to open the message in a running Thunderbird. David , you might be interested in reading through bug 226890 specifically https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=226890#c78 I'll test further as time allows.

Well, I spoke too soon that setting via control panel made some links work. They did for a while, but now back to every link opening a compose window. I'll try again tomorrow on a system that doesn't have a lot of stuff in MimeTypes.rdf

With TotalMessage extension installed, most News links work as expected (at least the links that I tested) Another +1 for TotalMessage. Apologies if I'm disturbing your Holiday season. Merry Christmas!