UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/70.0.3538.102 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Set xdg mail handler to Chrome by running the following command:

    xdg-settings set default-url-scheme-handler mailto google-chrome.desktop

2. Go to chrome://settings/handlers?search=handler, and ensure that no handler is set for mailto links.

3. Run the following command:

    xdg-open mailto:foo@example.com

What is the expected behavior?
Chrome should ask how to open the mailto link.

What went wrong?
A new empty browser window popped up. Nothing else happened.

This is confusing to users, because it makes it look like the webpage is broken. There is nothing that indicates to users that they should configure a mail handler for something to happen. Especially if it is not clear from the context of the page that the link is a mailto link (and the user does not check the url), then it looks to the user as if something should have happened after clicking, but nothing did happen.

Did this work before? N/A 

Chrome version: 70.0.3538.102  Channel: stable
OS Version: 4.15.0-39-generic
Flash Version: 

This is a continuation of crbug.com/858966, which was closed incorrectly. I could not re-open the issue, so I am filing a new one.

Note that this issue is not specific to Linux, I have seen people using Windows 10 experience the same issue. In that case, the default email client was also set to Chrome in the Windows settings. The mechanism may be different (xdg on Linux, some other OS facilities on Windows) but the end result is the same: Chrome opens the system's default email client, which is Chrome itself, and because no handler is set for mailto links, nothing happens.