Orangeman Burns - Sriram Sridharan's Blog

I wanted to make Gmail the default client for my Windows 7 machine but, as I found out to my dismay, it is not natively possible. My Google searches came up with some posts with non-working answers. Here's a method which will work with all browsers - IE, Chrome, Opera, Firefox and Safari. It will open the default browser with the Gmail url.

1. Right click on an empty space on your desktop

2. Select New|Shortcut

3. In the text box labelled "Type the Location of the item", enter https://gmail.com if you want the gmail main page to open up or https://mail.google.com/mail?extsrc=mailto if you want the new email compose page to open up and hit next

4. In the text box titled "Type a name for the shortcut", enter Gmail

5. There will be a shortcut named Gmail on your desktop. Copy it to a directory where the shortcut will not deleted. My suggestion would be to copy to C:\Windows\

Now comes the risky part. Editing the Registry. As usual, I will not be responsible for any damages that may occur

6. Hit Windows key + R together. In the dialog box that comes up, type regedit and hit enter

7. Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\mailto\shell\open\command in the left tab and on the right tab, double click Default and enter the location of the shortcut encased in quotes[In this case "C:\Windows\Gmail.url"]

8. Close the registry editor

You're now all set.