Set mailto to use Gmail in Chrome

Posted on April 14, 2009 by a1979shakedown

Who doesn’t use webmail these days?  I use Gmail, and I’m sure most everyone else does too.  I also use Google Chrome, yet for some reason all those ‘mailto:address@email.com’ links don’t shoot you over to Google’s Gmail, they try and open your desktop email client!  Anyways, I remembered changing this in Firefox a while back, and just now decided it was time to change it in Chrome.  I found several articles online telling me to download and install GMail Notifier, which constantly runs and notifies you on your desktop of any new emails.  I didn’t want to download and install anything, much less something that’s going to constantly run.

NOTE: The following requires you to edit your registry

 

  1. Open your registry editor: In Vista, goto the Start Menu and type ‘regedit’. (XP users type ‘regedit’ in Run)
  2. Goto HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open\command
  3. There should be a ‘(Default)’ variable of type ‘REG_EXPAND_SZ’.  Right-click on it and select ‘Modify…’
  4. Copy and paste the following string into the value:

C:\Users\Nate\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe -app=https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1

 

WARNING: Replace ‘Nate’ in the string with your user name

 

There you have it, now when you click on an email address while browsing a new Chrome window should open to GMail’s Compose window.

 

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)

Filed under: Miscellaneous | Tagged: , ,

«

7 Responses

  1. Erik, on April 24th, 2009 at 11:44 am Said:

    Hi,

    This works a treat, but you might want to make a little change to the string.

    C:\Users\Nate\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe -app=https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=”%1″

    You need to have quotes around the %1, otherwise if the mailto link has spaces in for the body or some such, it chops off at the first space.

    The quotes fix this problem.

    Thanks!

  2. a1979shakedown, on April 24th, 2009 at 11:59 am Said:

    On my machine, the quotes didn’t work. I have heard of this, so perhaps I should’ve mentioned it in the post.

    It appears that quotes work on some machines and doesn’t work on others.

  3. dcuptoejuice, on May 11th, 2009 at 10:53 am Said:

    I can’t get this to work on XP. Is the address different?

  4. a1979shakedown, on May 11th, 2009 at 12:21 pm Said:

    Try putting quotes around the entire string.

  5. jubbly, on May 22nd, 2009 at 8:31 am Said:

    It works! thank you so much.
    I went through the reg editor searching for mailto, and killing off outlook and windows mail (i am certain i dont like them!) and its now perfect. even in a different browser e.g. ie8, when i click on a mailto link a little chrome window appears with only the gmail compose screen, not even the full browser. Brilliant.

  6. a1979shakedown, on May 22nd, 2009 at 10:07 am Said:

    Yeah there’s no point in using a desktop mail application. Glad it worked for you!

  7. Jeff S, on July 27th, 2009 at 5:12 am Said:

    I’ve been using this for quite some time. An easier way to implement this would be to open up any folder window, like “My Documents”, goto Tools/Folder Options. Click on the “File Types” tab, find the “URL:MailTo protocol” file type, click Advanced button, and change the “Open” action to the string you listed.

    This would be probably for more novice users. No regedit required!

Leave a Reply