How to set Gmail as Firefox default email client

If anytime, while browsing the Internet, you wish to send an email to a person, usually while browsing, by clicking on a web address link (mailto: abc@website.com), then you will by prompted by Windows with desktop email clients/applications like Windows Mail, Outlook Express etc. After that you will be having a window which already contains that email address entered in “To:” box. All you have to do is  just write the message in the body of the email and click Send. Its fairly easy and time saving feature. But what happen, if you have a web email such as Gmail which you can’t use with such client applications, as Gmail is a web application and doesn’t have any email client. Then solution to this problem is to configure Firefox to set Gmail as a default email client.

Note: This trick work with Firefox 3.0 or later.

Instructions:

1. In the Address Bar type: about:config and hit Enter.
2. Click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button, it will open configurations settings of firefox.
3. In the filter box type: gecko.handlerService
4. You will get a list of services. The first one should be gecko.handlerService. allowRegisterFromDifferentHost
5. Double click on gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost and give change its value to “True”.
6. Now in the filter box type: network.protocol-handler. external.mailto and check if it is set to “True” otherwise do set its value to “True” by double clicking it.
7. Now copy the following script in the Address Bar and hit Enter.
   
javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler
("mailto","https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","GMail")

8. If you use a Google application use this following script and press Enter

   javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler
(”mailto”,”https://mail.google.com/a/example.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s”,”GMail”)

   *Change example.com to your own domain name

9. Firefox should prompt you whether you want to add Gmail application or not. Click on the “Add Application” button.
10. From now on every time you click on any web address link, a small window will open and prompt you to use Gmail. Once you click on it, you will be redirected to Gmail web page.
11. Now for security reasons, when you have finished with this procedure, set the value of gecko.handlerService.allowRegisterFromDifferentHost back to “False”.

*If anytime you decided to remove Gmail as your default e-mail client, you need to go to Firefox’s “Tools” menu, then select “Options”, then go to “Application” tab. Find mailto and select Application Detail from the Drop-down menu. Remove Gmail by selecting GMail and then click “Remove”.