making entourage my default email program

C

cates.justin

i am new to mac, and i was wondering this. when i want to send an
email using a link on a webpage it stills calls up my mail program and
not my entourage. i feel stupid asking because i am usually pretty
good with computers. anything would help.

justin
 
M

Michel Bintener

Hi,

in earlier versions of Mac OS X, Apple would include a panel in the System
Preferences that allowed you to set your default e-mail client and web
browser. As of Mac OS X 10.3, however, they've removed that pane, and you'll
now have to configure your default apps in either Safari's (for browsers) or
Apple Mail's (for e-mail clients) preferences. Open Mail, go to
Mail>Preferences, and under the General tab, you should be able to select
Entourage as the default program.

Michel
 
A

Allen Watson

Or, you can download the free utility, "IC-Switch", which appears to still
work in Tiger: <http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/15721>
Click to expand...
Another free one is "More Internet" which gives you a Preference Panel for
setting what app handles which protocol. To set the default e-mail program
you set the "mailto" protocol; to set your browser set the "http" and
"https" protocols. And you can set default apps for a bunch of other things
as well. <http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/16066>
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur

Allen Watson said:
Another free one is "More Internet" which gives you a Preference Panel for
setting what app handles which protocol.
Click to expand...

IC switch accesses the Interent Config database (which, nowadays, runs
on top of the LaunchServices, where the settings are actually stored).
If there is a corruption in the IC database (which is not so uncommon),
the settigns there don;t actually reflect how the System will behave.

I believe More Internet actually queries the LaunchServices.
RCDefaultApp sure does anyway. Very convenient for troubleshooting
issues with the various Interent-related protocols.

Corentin
 
M

Michel Bintener

If you still want to have access to all these settings, you can use the
wonderful freeware RCDefaultApp
http://www.rubicode.com/Software/RCDefaultApp/
A must have...


Corentin
Click to expand...

Lots of interesting information, thanks Corentin and Allen. In the end, I
went for RCDefaultApp, as it looks quite nice and does its job well. Not
that I really need it; I don't change my default email client and browser
that often, and it's not really that much of a hassle to launch Mail and
perform the change in there. It's just that I'm slightly mad at Apple for
removing perfectly logical settings from the System Preferences, where the
average user might actually be able to find them, and for putting them
inside their own applications, which is not necessarily the first place that
springs to mind when you're trying to define non-Apple applications as
defaults.

Michel
 
C

Corentin Cras-Méneur

Michel Bintener said:
It's just that I'm slightly mad at Apple for
removing perfectly logical settings from the System Preferences, where the
average user might actually be able to find them, and for putting them
inside their own applications, which is not necessarily the first place that
springs to mind when you're trying to define non-Apple applications as
defaults.
Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more! It makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.
Stairways developped Internet Config a *while* ago and eventually Apple
integrated it into the system through a control panel/prefpane. I wonder
what took them to remove it :-(


Corentin
 
A

Allen Watson

What's the logic of this? I do not want to use Mail.app, but to set my
default to another app, I have to launch Mail and then _set up a mail
account in it_ just in order to access the preferences I want to change. And
I dare not _delete_ mail.app, but must keep it taking up space on my disk
just in case I ever need to reset that preference.
 
P

Paul Berkowitz

Well, you probably shouldn't delete Mail.app since it's part of the OS.
(Maybe some day Apple will face a lawsuit like Microsoft had with Internet
Explorer on Windows.) I wasn't aware you had to set up an account in
Mail.app - I think mine was probably set up automatically from that last
step when you install OS X and have to fill in internet info.

I'd guess that Apple did this as a proselytizing measure - to get people to
at least look at Mail before moving on to something else. Strange that it
didn't happen in the OS X version where Mail supplanted (Classic) Outlook
Express as default mail app, but one or two later. However, maybe it was
when Safari supplanted Internet Explorer as default browser? (That would be
Jaguar - OS 10.2.) You might recall that you could also set the various
sub-preferences (setting your default FTP client, etc.) from within IE both
back in OS 8/9 days and in 10.0-10.1 : in fact I think there were even a few
that could _only_ be set from IE in 10.0-10.1! Apple must have known they'd
be coming up with a new method. They knew they'd be dumping Internet Config,
I'm sure.

I suppose Apple could say that in OS 9 and 10.0-10.1 where they didn't
_have_ a built-in OS default browser and email app, they couldn't very well
have the prefs set anywhere but in a control panel/system preference, but
that now that they have default OS apps, it's only natural to make them full
defaults and do the changing there.

It still does feel odd, though.

--
Paul Berkowitz
MVP MacOffice
Entourage FAQ Page: <http://www.entourage.mvps.org/faq/index.html>
AppleScripts for Entourage: <http://macscripter.net/scriptbuilders/>

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