[PHYMAC]

When you click on the email link when browsing, Mail opens up to write the email, but I use entourage... How do you change it so entourage opens up?

thank you!

[wataru]

Make Entourage your default mail client. The setting is, frustratingly enough, within Mail.

[PHYMAC]

Where do you make that selection?

[Turnpike]

That's definitely a poor place for it.. not only from an ease-of-use perspective, but it more or less forces users to keep Mail around.

I'm not a fan of the practice. Luckily for me, I prefer Mail.app over other things I've tried, and don't have to bother with an exchange server or anything.


Mail>Preferences>General>Default Email Reader

[ManOfSteal]

Originally posted by PHYMAC:
Where do you make that selection?

Mail.app > Preferences > General > Default E-mail Reader: Entourage

[[APi]TheMan]

While relating Apple to Microsoft is very farfetched, what's with sticking the "Default" e-mail and browser preference in Mail.app and Safari? Boo!

[Turnpike]

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:
While relating Apple to Microsoft is very farfetched, what's with sticking the "Default" e-mail and browser preference in Mail.app and Safari? Boo!

exactly. Apple should avoid doing things like this.

[TETENAL]

Originally posted by [APi]TheMan:
While relating Apple to Microsoft is very farfetched, what's with sticking the "Default" e-mail and browser preference in Mail.app and Safari? Boo!

It's not done to force users to keep Safari and Mail, it's the result of user testing.

Those settings used to be in System Preferences and users that expected them there found them there and be done with it.

Other users expected these settings in the respective application. When they wanted Safari as default browser they expected to be able to set that in Safari. Same with Mail.

Both lines of thought - expect the setting in System Preferences vs. expect the setting in the respective app – are valid. Maybe the number of users who thought each is around 50/50 or. However, only the users that expected the setting the apps complained to Apple that they couldn't found them. What then happened was that Apple either did user testing and found that the majority of users expect the setting in the application, or the didn't do any user testing and just counted the number of complaints.

Now that the setting is in Safari and Mail, the idea is that other browsers/mail apps include this setting as well. You can also set the default browsers within Internet Explorer and OmniWeb for example. So you don't really have to keep Safari and Mail if you don't want to (or you will be able to trash them, when all other browsers adopted the new paradigm).

[Turnpike]

Why not have these preferences (which are OS-level preferences, not application-level) where they should belong (in system preferences) and then also make the preference easily accessible to be changed from within a program (and Safari and Mail could both take advantage of this).

Not only does it go against the traditions of the MacOS to move it into a specific app, but the preferences is about how the OS handles things that need an email client or web browser. In addition, the preferences are phrased as OS-level preferences (Default E-mail Reader) as opposed to the Application-level at which they are used (Use Mail as Default E-mail Reader?)

I'm sure this is a violation of the HIG, but I'm too lazy to check. Still, when did Apple ever follow that?