How To: Change Default Mail Client on OSX

How To: Change Default Mail Client on OSX 

When I moved away from Entourage to Thunderbird I had a huge issue with mailto: html links still attempting to open Entourage to send emails. OS X itself simply does not provide a simple way to change this default behavior.

So, the trick is to open OS X’s Mail Client and use that. Simply create a dummy account, it doesn’t matter what info you put in as you won’t be using it. Once Mail is opened, go to Preferences then click on the General Tab. There will be a “Default Mail Reader” drop down menu. Choose your default client (even Firefox or Safari if you have something like Zimbra or another web mail) and exit the client.

The other, and possibly better trick if you’re going to make this change across multiple computers such as an entire Enterprise setup is to edit one of the plist files.

In ~/Library/Preferences/ look for com.apple.LaunchServices.plist

Add

    LSHandlerRoleAll
    com.mail.client
    LSHandlerURLScheme
    mailto

Just under
LSHandlers


Options for mail client would be com.mozilla.firefox or com.microsoft.entourage or the preferences name of any other mail client. These can easily be found in the same folder. Once this is done, mailto: links will then open in your preferential mail client!

How To: Fix Safari 3.2 Crashing

I’m still a huge fan of Apple’s Safari Browser. I feel it’s faster (and much less of a memory hog) then Firefox.

But, the 3.2 Updated introduced a strange bug. Whenever I use tabbed browsing, it started crashing a lot. Clearing Cache and deleting preferences have not fixed at all. Even Onyx didn’t seem to help.

I was able to find a nice utility called AppleJack that really helped a lot. It can be downloaded from this VersionTracker Link: http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19596

Once AppleJack is installed reboot the computer. While it’s restarting hold down the ‘s’ key to go into single user mode. type (as an admin user): applejack auto restart

The computer will do a bunch of stuff cleaning up files, checking disks, etc, then reboot automatically. After this, Safari should all be good to go.

I have also heard that reinstalling Safari totally with the stand along installer off of Apple’s website fixes this issue.