Saturday, September 6, 2008

Google Chrome MAILTO fix for GMail on Windows Vista


Thanks to safekerala for posting a comment on my previous post about Chrome.  He pointed me to Brendan Nee's blog post about how to set Chrome to use GMail for MAILTO tags.  The problem is that only works for Windows XP, so I set out to make it work on Windows Vista.  Here's what you do...
  1. Open REGEDIT
  2. Navigate to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\WindowsMail.Url.Mailto
  3. Click on EXPORT and save a backup of this key first!
  4. Edit the value FriendlyTypeName, replace with the following:
"C:\Users\_username_\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe -app=https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto&url=%1"

Important: Be sure to replace _username_ with your actual username.  Remember that if you have a domain user account, rather than a workgroup account, you should use the exact profile path, which likely includes the domain, such as "Dave.MyDomain", etc.

Now whenever I click on a mailto: tag in a web page, it launches Chrome and goes directly to the Compose Message form.  Very nice indeed.

3 comments:

Ken Johnson said...

I couldn't get this to work using the registry location you gave.

I put the string you had in
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open\command

And that worked for me.

skatterbrainz said...

You are indeed correct! Funny that my "fix" seemed to work until my first reboot. Then it reverted back again. Thanks for sharing your solution with us!

aerohoff said...

Ken's version worked for me in Windows 7. Like he said, I put it in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\mailto\shell\open\command

It wasn't obvious to me that you have to copy the string without the quotes. It won't work with the quotes.

Thanks!