Getting Gmail to handle all mailto - links with registerProtocolHandler

Paul Irish

If you use Gmail you may become frustrated when you click a mailto: link by accident and now your desktop client of Outlook or Mail starts up.

Thanks to navigator.registerProtocolHandler() (which we've covered here before) you can wire up Gmail as your default mail client for all mailto: links in Chrome and Firefox.

Use Gmail popup screenshot

Here's how:

  1. First, open up a Gmail tab. You must do this from the Gmail tab, not your html5rocks one. :)
  2. Open your javascript console (cmd-opt-j on Mac, ctrl-shift-j on Windows) and enter:
  3. navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto", "https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s", "Gmail");
  4. Accept the confirmation from the browser.
  5. Click this mailto: link to test out your new Gmail mailto hookup!

Boom. Enjoy.

If you ever need to removing this setting, you can do that at chrome://settings/handlers in Chrome and Preferences->Applications->mailto in Firefox.