How To Ditch MS Outlook & Use Gmail When Clicking "mailto" Links
I picked up a sweet tip recently that saves me a ton of time on a daily basis. Here’s a little background:
I use FireFox, Gmail, and recently decided that I hate MS Outlook. I used to use MS Outlook for everything but I totally jumped ship and now firmly believe Gmail is a far superior option. MS Outlook is clunky and not very user friendly. You can’t check MS Outlook messages when you’re out on the road. Plus, Gmail plays great with my new iPhone (which is a whole ‘nother story). Although I consider myself pretty adept at using MS Outlook (I used it for years with up to 20 different email accounts & over a hundred message rules to sort incoming mail into specific folders), I now despize it and am finding myself more & more in love with Google products, more specifically in this case – Gmail.
I’m intimately familiar with some very advanced MS Outlook features but now I just find Gmail so much more user friendly and convenient. Recently, I went on a mission to figure out a way to make Gmail work with “mailto” links on web pages. If you’re unfamiliar with a mailto link it’s basically a link on a web page that usually says something like “Contact” or “Contact Us” and when clicked, it opens an email draft pre-addressed to the appropriate email address. Unfortunately for about 70% of all internet users plagued by Windows & MS Outlook an Outlook draft message will open by default. Many of us don’t like MS Outlook so everytime we inadvertantly click one of these links we have to be bothered with the task of memorizing the email address, waiting for MS Outlook to open & run only to close it again & then go to Gmail…
I suspect by now you either know exactly what I’m talking about or you have no clue what I mean, there’s no in-between here. If you have no idea what I’m talking about don’t waste your time with the rest of this blog post because it’s not intended for you… If you’re nodding your head and screaming out loud, “Chris, just tell me how the heck do I ditch MS Outlook & use Gmail for these here ‘mailto whatchamacallits’ from now on” – then keep readin’ 
) . . .
For a long time, I totally avoided clicking these links altogether and my main method of emailing people via these links was to hover over the link, observe their email address in my information bar, and then remember it & type it in a new Gmail message. Well I’ve found a much better solution that converts all of these “mailto” links into a nice one-click “Gmail compatible” option!
Here’s how it works…
(Keep in mind this is for Gmail lovers who are using Firefox…)
Step 1. Install the FireFox add-on known as “Grease Monkey.” It’s free and allows you to take advantage of many nifty scripts just like the one I’m about to reveal that lets you ditch MS Outlook for good. (I give Microsoft mad props for designing so many applications to use their software solutions by default because it’s good marketing, BUT people like options dammit!). You can get Grease Monkey for free here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748
Step 2. Once you’ve got Grease Monkey you’ll now be able to take advantage of many scripts designed to “play” with Grease Monkey. One of which is the script I recommend to banish MS Outlook from annoying you ever again. This one is called “Mailto 2 Webmail” and you can get it for free here:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/11324
In order for the Mailto 2 Webmail install to work properly you’ll first need to have Grease Monkey installed. Remember, after you installed Grease Monkey you’ll have to restart FireFox in order for Grease Monkey to start operating. If you click the “Install” button on the Mailto 2 Webmail page without having first fully installed Grease Monkey you’ll see a pageful of goofy code rather than actually getting Mailto 2 Webmail installed properly.
After you’ve properly installed Grease Monkey & restarted FireFox, go to Mailto 2 Webmail and install it too. Then, restart FireFox one more time so that Mailto 2 Webmail is also functioning & installed properly.
That’s it, you should be good to go! Oh yea, if you like Yahoo Mail you can re-configure Mailto 2 Webmail to work that way as well. As of now, Mailto 2 Webmail does not support Hotmail but that might change in the future…