Comments on: How to Make Gmail your Default Email Program in Windows 7 (Updated… again!)

By: val

val — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 17:22:15 +0000

Lucas is right and it’s super easy.

If you’re using Firefox, all you have to do is:
Tools>Options>Applications, then change the mailto action to Use Gmail.

Thank you!

By: dsackr

dsackr — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 10:45:27 +0000

@David, unfortunately, right click send to options in many windows programs will still bring up a mail program like Windows Live. This hack is meant to force Windows to open gmail when you click a mailto link. If you are sending a picture or document – log into gmail and attach the file from there…

By: dsackr

dsackr — Sat, 17 Mar 2012 10:42:44 +0000

@Tosca, Not sure what’s going on there – most likely something has changed on the reg file itself. If the header information in the file is modified at all, Windows won’t recognize it. You could open the reg file – and use the information in it to manually create the key from the file in your registry… but that is a advanced geek only task…

By: Tosca

Tosca — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 18:21:47 +0000

Hello, I have double clicked firefox-gmail.reg but getting error saying file cannot be imported as it is not a registry file. Windows 7 64bit. Thanks

By: David

David — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 03:57:29 +0000

Hello,
I followed your instructions for changing the default email to Gmail. I don’t have Chrome. Running Windows 7 with whatever the latest updates are. Double clicking on the renamed file didn’t work so I right clicked and selected Merge. Import wasn’t one of the options. The computer asked for permission to change something, warned me that I was about to change the registry and then said it successfully changed the registry. I was pumped at this point:) Then I right clicked on the photo I was trying to email (after I closed and restarted internet explorer) and it still started Windows Live. Do you know what I can do to get Gmail set as my default email program?
Cheers,
Dave

By: dsackr

dsackr — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 05:36:52 +0000

@Robert, replace the {} as well…

By: Robert

Robert — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:30:23 +0000

When I do this:
“if you are using chrome – open the txt file you just saved and replace {username} with the username you log in with”
do I replace the {} also, or just the text inside them?

By: Aaron Newton

Aaron Newton — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:47:20 +0000

On a related note – I have this working brilliantly (hooray), but it’s missing all of the usual menus and other chrome that usually appears around the composer window. I’m looking for a way to fix this – known fixes welcome!

By: Aaron Newton

Aaron Newton — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:28:19 +0000

“how do i change the .txt to .reg?”

I’m guessing you have file extensions hidden in your Windows Explorer (see http://windows.microsoft.com/en-AU/windows-vista/Show-or-hide-file-name-extensions). You could fix this and then rename the file in Windows Explorer with “.reg” instead of “.txt”, but another way would just be to open it in Notepad (click on the Windows icon in your tray and type “Notepad” into the search) and save it as a new copy with “.reg” as the file extension.

By: Aaron Newton

Aaron Newton — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 10:24:51 +0000

Cheers for pointing out how to do this.

If you want to find your Chrome (or other program) exe location on the system do the following.

1) Open Task Manager and find the Chrome process
2) Right click on this and “Go to Process”
3) Right click and select “Properties”

The execution path will be under “Location”. You should edit your path to reflect this in the file (just open it in Notepad). Replace all of the “\” characters in the path with “\\” (except for the last one) so “c:\program files\stuff\” would be “c:\\program files\\stuff\”. Save you file with the .reg extension. You can then double-click on the .reg file and it will install to the registry.

If you want to backup you registry first, you should open regedit (just type “regedit” into the program search which appears when you click the Windows icon on the tray). In regedit, navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\mailto\shell\open\” (hint – expanding the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and beginning to type “S-O-F…” would skip to “SOFTWARE” and the same for subsequent sub-folders). You can right-click on the “open” folder and export the existing registry entry to a .reg file – this will make reverting to the old entry easy.