Make Outlook the default handler for mailto links on macOS

On many corporate Macs one is forced to use Microsoft Outlook. That in itself is not that bad, but what annoys me is that Outlook doesn’t register itself as a handler for mailto: links. There is simply no option in its preferences to enable it.

The official documentation from Microsoft says I should do it via Mail.app. However, the problem is that new Mail.app asks for account creation if there is none. And I can’t set up a new account, as there is none to be set – Outlook is already coming pre-configured.

Thus, I’ve set to find an easier way. After a bit of poking around, I came up with the following:

Either brew install duti or nix-env -iA nixpkgs.duti would suffice.

duti -s com.microsoft.outlook mailto

Wait, there’s more

After publishing this blog post, I wanted to check if someone came up with the same solution, and I came across this thread on JAMF forums. The summary is that one can do much more, for example set Outlook as the default handler for calendars:

duti -s com.microsoft.outlook ics all

Or, Outlook can also be the default handler for the contacts:

duti -s com.microsoft.outlook vcf all

The rest of the thread also contains some approaches that don’t involve duti and do some heavy lifting with plistbuddy.