Set default mail client without adding mail account

Question

I'm on OSX el capitan (10.11.6).

I use outlook to access my email and would like outlook to be the default mail application. All the instructions I find online suggest that I should open mail and choose "Mail -> Preferences" to set the default mail app. Unfortunately Preferences is greyed out until an account is added. I don't have another account that I want to add to my mac.

How can I set the default mail client to Outlook without adding an account to the mail client?

Answer 1

The simplest way to do this - which doesn't involve messing with Mail itself - is the old faithful RCDefaultApp
Yes it's ancient; yes it still works; yes it's free.

It installs as a control panel from where you can set defaults for just about anything on the machine... including Mail.

Simply select from a drop menu

If you want to have a poke at the other sections, note it can take some time to build the apps/services list; don't think it's hung, it's just thinking ;-)

Answer 2

I finally found something easy that worked, the SetDefaultMailApp from Microsoft:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/office_for_mac_support_team_blog/2017/08/10/mac-outlook-support-utilities/

Answer 3

You can use the system-installed Python interpreter to quickly change the default mail app.

Copy/paste the following command into Terminal, replacing com.microsoft.Outlook with the application bundle identifier for your mail app. Outlook's bundle identifier is com.microsoft.Outlook.

/usr/bin/python2.7 <<EOF
import LaunchServices;
result = LaunchServices.LSSetDefaultHandlerForURLScheme(
    "mailto",
    "com.microsoft.Outlook")
print("Result: %d (%s)" % (
    result,
    "Success" if result == 0 else "Error"))
EOF

If you're not sure what the bundle identifier is for your mail app, run osascript -e 'id of app "Some App Name"' to find it. For example, osascript -e 'id of app "Mail"' returns com.apple.mail.

Answer 4

Sometimes the easiest solutions stare us in the face and it's easy to overlook them. I get asked this regularly and the easiest way to do this is to just set up Apple Mail with your email account and then change the default email application to Outlook.

You don't have to use Apple Mail again after that. So, while you're technically still adding an account to Mail, you don't have to use it, or you can remove it after you've set the default to Outlook.

EDIT

I just wanted to add that in some cases, certain Apple software (e.g. Photos) have their own settings for which email client to use when sharing content. So you will need to select Outlook as the default within these Apps as well if you want to share content via email.

Answer 5

Sometimes, even after setting Outlook as default mail client in Apple Mail - with an account you remove afterwards - (how could Apple ever think this is a good place to stick this setting) it does not stick.

Just to be sure, after setting the pref in Mail, run this through Terminal:

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/\
  LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -all local,system,user

Answer 6

I know it's an old question, but I needed to do the same, possibly from command-line, and I found a solution.

You will need Homebrew, which can be installed with:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Then, you will need duti, which is available through Brew:

brew install duti

Now, we need to find out the name of the mail application you want to set as default, we can do that running the following command (change Airmail with your desired mail client):

mdls -name kMDItemCFBundleIdentifier -r /Applications/Airmail\ 3.app
# this will return "it.bloop.airmail2"

Now, we can set our desired app as default mail client with:

duti -s it.bloop.airmail2 mailto

That's it!