I finally gave up, but I thought I’d post the details of the failure to warn others off trying what I did.įirst I followed the suggestion of setting the preference in Mail’s preference pane, but that didn’t work, as others trying to do this have found. I have been trying to do Print -> PDF -> Mail PDF and wanted my other email app to handle the new email message, but have found nothing that works to do this. Why it’s not a part of the “Network” Control Panel, or even its own Control Panel, escapes me completely. If you wanted to change your default Web browser, by the way, Apple Safari has a similar option on its Preferences pane, in the “General” area. Click the little red button on the top left to close the window and quit Mail without finishing up the configuration steps. The topmost element is what you want to change: pick the mailer you’d prefer as your default email handler (You can see that I use Microsoft Entourage, not Apple Mail). Once you can get to the Preferences, here’s what you’ll see: When you start it up, the program will step you through the configuration steps, but you don’t have to finish these steps, just go step-by-step until the Preferences option on the Mail menu isn’t greyed out. In the old days, there was a separate Control Panel for changing all these settings, but now you need to know the trick…įor changing your default email program, it turns out you need to launch the Mail.app program just once to get to its Preferences panel. While there’s a lot about Mac OS X that I think is wonderfully crafted, changing the default email program (or Web browser, for that matter) is pretty baffling.

Change default app mac os x