Other email-related programs installed on your PC (like Google Chrome, Opera, or in my case, “Open in Mac”, a side effect of running Windows 10 in a virtual machine on my Mac.).

The email programs you install on your PC (like Thunderbird, Outlook, and even Windows Live Mail, all of which I installed at one time or another and so are present in the example above).

The list is generated from several sources, including: If you don’t see the application you want, then you don’t have this option. If you see the application you want to use to send mail - perhaps you use Thunderbird to manage your email, but for some reason it’s not the default - just click on the one you want. Click on the currently-listed application (Chrome, in my example above, which I’ll explain in a moment), and you’ll be presented with a drop-down list of possible choices. (If that doesn’t appear search for “choose default apps”). To change it in Windows 10, run the settings app, search for “mail”, and click on “Choose a default mail app” when the option appears. This is the email program installed on your PC that is used when your PC encounters a request to deal with email.Ĭommon programs include the default Mail program that comes with Windows, Microsoft Office’s Outlook, Thunderbird, and any of perhaps hundreds of other mail programs you can install. In your case, your system’s default email client is obviously Outlook. Windows has a notion of what your “default” email client is.

An installed email program can be set as the default to access your web-based email service.

Web-based email can typically not easily be set as the default for sending, with the exception of Gmail if you use Chrome.

(The process is slightly different for Windows 7.)

You can easily tell Windows 10 what installed email program to use as the default for sending mail.Windows has a notion of a “default” email program used to send mail, most commonly in response to a webpage’s “mailto:” link.

Thunderbird mail program