The Mail app on your Mac is a decent email app and comes pre-installed and set as the default email client. However, if you don’t want to use the Mail app as the default email client, you can use a different email app, such as Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, and I’ll show you how. How To Change Default Email Client Content provided by Microsoft Applies to: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Microsoft Windows XP Professional Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2002 More.
Mail is set as the default email program on our Mac, so when we happen to click on an email link in anything (say, our browser), the Mail app automatically opens up and creates an email message. We don’t want that, we’d like to be able to designate our chosen email apps (I use Thunderbird, she uses Entourage). How do you change this? While there’s a lot about Mac OS X that I think is wonderfully crafted, changing the default email program (or Web browser, for that matter) is pretty baffling. In the old days, there was a separate Control Panel for changing all these settings, but now you need to know the trick For changing your default email program, it turns out you need to launch the Mail.app program just once to get to its Preferences panel.
When you start it up, the program will step you through the configuration steps, but you don’t have to finish these steps, just go step-by-step until the Preferences option on the Mail menu isn’t greyed out. Once you can get to the Preferences, here’s what you’ll see: The topmost element is what you want to change: pick the mailer you’d prefer as your default email handler (You can see that I use Microsoft Entourage, not Apple Mail). Click the little red button on the top left to close the window and quit Mail without finishing up the configuration steps. That’s all there is to it. If you wanted to change your default Web browser, by the way, Apple Safari has a similar option on its Preferences pane, in the “General” area.
Why it’s not a part of the “Network” Control Panel, or even its own Control Panel, escapes me completely. Wouldn’t that be easier? I struggled with the email client reverting to Apple’s Mail whenever I clicked an email hyperlink (ie http ‘mailto’). No matter how many times I followed the steps in this article, Mail kept opening as my default email client. Turns out the issue is fixed within my browser – Firefox’s Preferences page. Since Firefox had Mail listed as my default client it was the culprit, changing the default anytime I clicked a mailto link.
Mail and MacOS were not to blame so Apple is off the hook for this one. Hope this saves somebody some aggravation. I have been trying to do Print -> PDF -> Mail PDF and wanted my other email app to handle the new email message, but have found nothing that works to do this. Desktop pdf form for mac. I finally gave up, but I thought I’d post the details of the failure to warn others off trying what I did.
Change Default Email Client Mac Os X
First I followed the suggestion of setting the preference in Mail’s preference pane, but that didn’t work, as others trying to do this have found. Next, I installed and used Rubicode to try setting the preferences more granularly, but no matter what I tried, even changing every single reference to Mail to my other email app, iOS opened Mail to send the message. Finally, stupidly, I tried what somebody else suggested above, and deleted the Mail app altogether. Kindle app with newstand for mac. I don’t know if it was because I did this after setting things using Rubicode, but for me, this caused a major hailstorm.