Setting Default Mail Application in Panther
Monday, May 2nd, 2005
I think I’ve gone over this at some point in the past, but I just want to reiterate how crazy I think it is that to change the default mail application in Mac OS X Panther, you have to do it in the preferences of the mail.app application itself. Tiger should be arriving here any day now, and we’ll see if that changes in the new version, but here are the instructions as of Pather:
1) Open the mail.app application (in the finder, go to the applications folder and double click Mail)
2) Click on Mail on the toolbar at the top of the screen
3) Click Preferences… in the menu that opened
4) Make sure you are in the Genral tab of the preferences menu
5) click the drop down box next to default email reader, click select, and maneuver to the application you want to use as your default e-mail handler. In my case I went to the Applications folder and clicked on Thunderbird. I switched to Thunderbird, because Mail.app is horrible at handling my large IMAP email folders. That is another thing I hope the Tiger upgrade will fix, cause I’d really like to use spotlight for my e-mail. Search is one of Thunderbird’s weakest areas I think.
UPDATE: The location for changing the default e-mail client is the same in tiger as it was in Panther, but after much fussing and fretting I got mail.app working well enough with my e-mail that I hope I can use it as my default mail client. I have some other things that I’m still trying to work out, and I hope to post about mail.app and tiger in the next couple of days.
I wish I had found this before I lost the mail.app in Panther. Have no idea what happened, but it must have occurred while I was trying to set the default mail application. Now I have no email application for websites I visit. Yahoo won’t work with Mac, and I don’t know what else to do. This computer had everything installed on it when I bought it used, and I don’t have a Panther disk. Help?