Summary: 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
When I installed Gmail Notifier setup it doesn't completly install. It doesn't install the Gmail default. It giveS the message (ordinal 345 could not be located.in the dynamentic link lib. COMCTLCTL 32.DLL hOW DO i FIX IT?
Posted by: Lyle at April 7, 2010 10:25 AMThanks a lot for your advice! It worked perfectly for mt Gmail.
Posted by: Emily at April 15, 2010 10:08 AMWhen I try to create a default email I followed your advice and clicked on tools, internet options, programs. But email options are not listed. What’s next?
Posted by: cuinhell at May 8, 2010 11:35 AMOK.Working!and i have gmail in mail list in internet explorer!the problem was that i had gmail notifier but was not installed?????how s that? dont ask.i dont know.
Posted by: Heli at August 13, 2010 6:43 PMLeo,
You made may day. After talking to Dell, searching the web and then agreeing to pay $38 dollars to Microsoft Just Answer I thought I was dead. Then I made one more try passed on deductions I had made from all of the above. Leo, you nailed it, NO PROFILE HAS BEEN CREATED. TO CREATE A NEW PROFILE, USE THE MAIL ICON IN THE CONTROL PANEL. That's what I put in my search. It found you and
How do I change the "mailto:" or default mail program?
That did it. You may want to rewrite it for Windows 7, but it was close enough for me to find in Windows 7. My search was the exact message I was getting on the Windows 7 screen when I was trying to send and email directly from a pdf document. By the way, when I went to the Mail Icon I got another crazy pop up that was looking for a profile. However the information they asked for meant nothing to me, so it was worthless.
Thanks for being there.
Rod C
Posted by: Rod C at September 1, 2010 8:56 AM