OSX 10.11.1 El Capitan, Changing the Default Mail Client

August 2016 update: Please take a look at the comments before embarking on the fix detailed below. In later releases of OSX 10.11 the procedure may be more simple than the steps I took with 10.11.1

Intended Audience: Anybody struggling to change the default OSX Mail Client under El Capitan

Resolution:

Go into System Preferences > iCloud – sign out!

Restart your Mac

Launch “Apple Mail” > Preferences > General – Change the default mail client

Exit “Apple Mail”

Sign back into iCloud!

Back Story:

I wanted to quickly share a tweet from Tweetbot to a friend by email, I was surprised when “Apple Mail” launched and asked me to setup an email account, I do not use “Apple Mail” I was using Airmail as my primary email client at the time.

What should have been a quick change of settings turned into a 10 minute battle with El Capitan to change the default mail client!

Googling revealed that I needed to make this change under “Apple Mail” > Preferences, rather than System Preferences. This was not a problem, although I did have to create an account within “Apple Mail” before the preferences pane became accessible. This done, the field that needed changing was obvious, Preferences > General > Default email reader

I made the change, closed “Apple Mail” and tried again!

“Apple Mail” launched !?

I tested an email link from a website to check that this was a system wide rather than an issue specific to Tweetbox. “Apple Mail” launched again!

I checked the default mail client setting within “Apple Mail” preferences, it had reset back to “Apple Mail”.

I set the default email reader to be Airmail a second time. Exited “Apple Mail”, then I relaunched Apple Mail but it had returned Apple Mail.

This was resolved by signing out of iCloud in System Preferences > iCloud, restarting OSX, after this I was able to change the default email client.

23 thoughts on “OSX 10.11.1 El Capitan, Changing the Default Mail Client

  1. I’d like to try your solution but this warning popped up with the first step: “If you turn off iCloud Drive, all documents stored in iCloud will be deleted from this Mac. Your documents will still be available on other devices using iCloud.” Should I be concerned with this message?

    Like

    • Hello,
      I do not think you need to be concerned.
      I interpret this message to mean, iCloud documents currently on your mac will be deleted, however, when you re-enable iCloud they will sync back down again.

      Good luck, let me know how you get on.

      Like

  2. Hi! this problem was solved by me just by going to the default mail app clicking going to “Preferences > General > Default mail reader” instead of just selecting Airmail from the drop down I went to the “Select..” button, this led me to my Applications folder where I manually selected Airmail.

    Maybe give this a shot so you don’t have to go through this long work around.

    El Capitan 10.11.2

    Like

    • Just been rebuilding my Mac and forgot about this issue until after I had again set up all my photo library. Now have just installed MS Outlook and got to the point where I encountered this same issue with trying to make Outlook the default mail app. I did not want to have to go through the same pain as I did last time when I signed out of iCloud, set default mail client, then signed back in – don’t get me wrong, that DOES work but it causes my entire 30GB photo library to re-upload to iCloud when I sign back in to iCloud.

      So this time, I followed tomtominc’s suggestion which worked a treat for me and saved hours of photo re-uploading. Thanks tomtominc!

      Like

  3. Thanks for this – I was having the same issue and this did, indeed, resolve it. One thing to be aware of, however, is that after re-enabling iCloud on my Mac, it proceeded to re-upload my entire photo library – all 30GB of it – to iCloud even though the library was never deleted anywhere. Takes a while and could cause some grief for anyone on a metered connection.

    Like

    • Following the directions here (log out of iCloud, reboot, etc.) did not allow me to set Outlook 2016 as default mail client. The instructions on this link to the Apple developer site did work.

      Like

      • The method I have outlined here was the method I used with 10.11.1

        It is likely that with later versions there is a better way. Thanks for sharing your findings.

        Like

    • Can confirm that this worked perfectly on my 10.11.5, without needing to restart or logout from iCloud.
      Thank you!

      Like

    • i have opera browser installed on mac (el capitain), However, for some reason the default email programme in mail is set to opera – if I change it back to mail, it defaults to opera every time I open mail. how can I void this happening?

      Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s