One of the first things I did when I bought my netbook was to download chrome. Now I haven't actually clicked a mailto link until today, and guess what happened? Internet explorer in all it's glory opened up. I didn't like that. One of the solutions I found was to look for URI.mailto or something to that effect in the file types menu of an explorer window and make some changes there, but well I didn't like that method much and I couldn't find what they were talking about in the first place.
I started searching for the term mailto in the registry, and I came upon this line right below.
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open\command
Unfortunately I deleted the original line so if anyone has it I would really like to know what it originally said, but none the less I have the line to insert if you want Chrome to open up gmail and insert the mail address!
This brings me to my next point ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR REGISTRY in case you muck something up.
I changed the key
to the below (change out onaclov for your username) and you should be set to go! Of course if you want to use another type of email client and/or browser you're going to have to change a few things. Basically all I'm doing is calling the chrome application, and passing the gmail address with mailto and URL %1 passed to it. The ideal way would be to call the default browser
Additional Notes:
Oddly enough I found that if I go to IE and click options and then programs it only shows Outlook Express and Windows Live Mail which I initially thought was the culprit and in some ways it might have been, so I did a search for Windows Live Mail.
I found this:
As you can see it looks like mine has an entry for GMAIL, which of course is completely incorrect
as I was testing some things out trying to get it to work, if you add a Key there and name it whatever you name it, when you go to IE and Tool Options and Programs and Email you'll see those entries the problem is I have/had no idea what to put in there which lead me to the initial piece of the post finding mailto.
If I had the original mailto contents I "might" be able to remember what that was doing and possibly setup the entry on the left (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail\Gmail) to actually open whatever browser you want as well as whatever email client you want based on that location (rather then having to keep entering in the registry if you decide to change).
Well if you have any other items of note please let me know.
Good luck
