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.
Also, I manually changed the default mail client in the Mail.app preferences from Mail to Outlook, and when I did a compare of the com.apple.launchservices.secure.plist file before and after, only the mailto had changed. Can I change the default mail app away from Apple Mail in OS X? Launch the Mail client in OS X. Click on the General tab and look for 'Default email reader'.
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. I finally gave up, but I thought I’d post the details of the failure to warn others off trying what I did. 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. I don’t know if it was because I did this after setting things using Rubicode, but for me, this caused a major hailstorm. When I tried to print to mail a PDF, I got an error saying the action “New Mail Message” had encountered an error and I should examine the preferences and try again. Much googling terms later I had failed to find any way to resolve that error – I couldn’t figure out how to edit the action’s preferences – and I decided to give up. To restore Mail, I used Pacifist and my install disks to install Mail only, then downloaded the Mac OSX Update Combo 10.6.5 to update to the latest version. In short, do not delete Mail, and frankly I wouldn’t recommend using Rubicode either unless you REALLY REALLY know what you are doing.
I consider myself a power user and I’m a programmer (though not of Objective C or Applescript) and I don’t have enough REALLYs. Or if you do, and you succeed, will you post here how you did it? Hello, I have a questions which i HOPE someone can help me with. I have a PC at the office running Outlook using a POP email acct. I also have it accepting an AOL email. I have both these email accts set up on my MACbook Pro and my Iphone.
The AOL email, I can read and delete from one computer and it will affect the computer at my office. The problem is I can do the Same to the POP email acct. How can I get by this? So what I would like to be able to do is delete an email that comes in to my POP email on my Apple and have it automatically make the change on my PC at work. Hope your not confused!
Thanks for listening! There is workaround for emailing an image from Preview using Entourage that I just found. Just drag the icon for the pdf (or image) and drop in on the Entourage Icon on your dock or in an open email you are editing. The icon I am talking about is in the title bar, next to the name of the file. It is a bit tricky to grab the icon without moving the window, but it is possible. I found this idea on the apple discussing boards, so credit is due there.
But it did take me a while to figure out what icon they were talking about.
When you reply to an email message, selects the email account to use for sending your reply. If the original message was sent to an email address that appears in one of your Outlook accounts, the corresponding account is selected for your reply automatically. Only if none of your email addresses appears in the original message does Outlook use the default account for composing a reply. The default account is also used when you compose a rather than a reply. While it is possible to change the account used to send a message manually, it is easy to forget this, so it makes sense to set the default to the account you prefer to use.