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The 'mailto:' or default mail program is a concept maintained by Windows and changed using Internet Explorer. Usually. We examine how to change the default mail program to a couple of popular services.
When viewing some web sites, I want to send them an email for whatever reason. I click, "contact us", a window opens and I type my question. When I press, "send", I realize that the email is being sent using Outlook, and as a result I asked to setup a POP address etc. I prefer to send and receive my messages using my Yahoo account. Can you tell me how I can set it up so that when sending a message as explained above, yahoo will come up as my email carrier?
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It's not that hard to change the system default mail program to one of a pre-defined list of applications. Not surprisingly, HotMail and Outlook Express are among the default choices.
If you want something else, like GMail or Yahoo Mail, things get a little more interesting.
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First the easy part.
The system has a notion of a "default" email client. That means this is the email program that will be used when a generic request to deal with email is received. The most common type of request is the HTML "mailto:" action you'll see on web pages. If a link is encoded with "mailto:" instead of "http:" when someone clicks on it the browser will fire up the default mail client for that user to compose a new email message.
In your case your system's default email client is obviously Outlook.
To change it, fire up Internet Explorer, hit the Tools menu, the Internet Options... menu item, and then click on the Programs tab. You should see something like this:
If you then click on the E-mail: dropdown, you'll see the full list of available options:
Simply select the email program you want to be the default program, and you're all set.
It's that simple, right?
Nope.
I can hear several of you yelling at your computers right now: "Why doesn't my list show Yahoo Mail like in the example!?".
Well, the "problem" is that something needs to be installed or set up on your system in order to make those options available. You'll notice that Thunderbird is on my list as well, and that showed up after I installed Thunderbird.
Yahoo was added to my list after I installed Yahoo Instant Messenger. Installing YIM actually has the potential to install quite a bit, so I definitely advise selecting the "custom" install and paying close attention to all the install options. I turned many things off, but left "Browser Services" checked, which I believe includes the feature we want:
But what about GMail?
GMail actually doesn't show up on my list, and yet it is my current default mail program. To do this, I installed the GMail Notifier. It's a handy little utility that notifies you when you have new GMail messages. And as I found out, one of the configuration options during the installation is to set GMail as the default mail handler:
That option is available again in the Notifier when it's running, so you can reset it properly should it ever get changed.
Now, as to why it doesn't show up in Internet Explorer's options list - I have no idea.
Article C2809 - October 13, 2006
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
What version of Yahoo messenger did you use? Im running Xp on an old laptop and having trouble finding the set up page you refer to in this article
Posted by: Scott at June 27, 2011 2:02 PMI use IE9 and don't have a window that displays the neat Internet Options as you picture. Where do I go from here?
24-Nov-2011
And yet, every time I want to send a link, my default has defaulted BACK to Outlook. HOW can I keep it OE? I couldn't ever do it in all the computers I've had. It stays until an update - from Wednesday to update Tuesday. Very annoying.
Posted by: Toni Pralle at December 9, 2011 6:17 PM@Toni
Posted by: Mark J at December 10, 2011 2:44 AMUnfortunately, Microsoft is being arrogant in this case. Whenever you run Outlook, it automatically sets itself as the default mailto: address. They assume that if you are using it, you want it to be your main email client. I went into the Outlook options to try changing this. but the changes always reverted back to Outlook. Maybe someone else out there has a solution.
Just get poppy:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Internet/E-mail/Mail-Utilities/Poppy-Date.shtml
Poppy will configure to let you know when any email hits your server for just about any pop account or IMAP account (IMAP which will download all folders from your web based account)
You can also set up poppy to bring up any email client you have installed on your machine.
Posted by: Robert Jacobs at December 29, 2011 7:39 AM