How to verify new email window is opened when clicking a "mailto:" link on a web page in selenium webdriver with C#

Question

I have tried the following to verify a new window handle is generated after clicking a mailto link on a web page but the webdriver seems to only recognise the one window handle i.e. the webpage itself. My code below is supposed to verify the a new email window has opened up after clicking the mailto link but it doesn't work.

As it only recognised one window handle it can't switch to the mail client.

    internal void SendNewEmail()
    {
        _elementInteraction.Click(_emailObject);

        Thread.Sleep(5000); 

        string mainWindowHandle = driver.CurrentWindowHandle;
        // Get all window handles after the click
        var windowHandles = driver.WindowHandles;

        // Iterate through the window handles
        foreach (var handle in windowHandles)
        {
            // Switch to the new window
            if (handle != mainWindowHandle)
            {
                driver.SwitchTo().Window(handle);

                // Check if the title of the new window contains expected text (modify as needed)
                if (driver.Title.Contains("New Email"))
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("New email window opened successfully.");
                    // Close the new window (optional)
                    driver.Close();
                }
                else
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("New email window not opened.");
                }

                // Switch back to the main window
                driver.SwitchTo().Window(mainWindowHandle);
            }
        }

        // Close the WebDriver
        driver.Quit();
    }

Any help greatly appreciated, as always. Thanks

EDIT: There is no error message, it only recognises the web page as a window handle even after opening up the new email. Therefore it cannot 'switch' to the new window. Sorry I can't give any more info.

Answer 1

Selenium Web Driver can only interact with web browser windows. The mail client is a separate application, therefore Selenium cannot interact with it. What you are trying to accomplish is not possible with Selenium.

As an alternative, you might be able to write C# code to detect that the mail client has opened up and is running in memory. Perhaps use the .NET API to see if a Process exists, for example, try to see if Outlook.exe is running in memory. Even then, you can only verify the mail client is running. You cannot verify a "New Message" window is present.

To be honest, Selenium is not the right tool for the job. Consider finding another UI automation framework that can interact with other applications, or just run this test manually.

The kind of code you are automating is dead easy: <a href="mailto:[email protected]"> — not trusting that this works is like distrusting the major browser vendors and the W3C to create a usable HTML spec.

The effort to automate this particular test case is probably not worth it. A human is a more suitable executor for this use case. Run the test as needed.