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:
- Install duti
Either brew install duti
or nix-env -iA nixpkgs.duti
would suffice.
- Run the following command
duti -s com.microsoft.outlook mailto
- Enjoy clicking on
mailto:
links.
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
.