So, I chose Microsoft Outlook.app as my default. There may be some other things you need to do after choosing the default email client in this setting.įirst, though, you will want to choose your default email client (or reader) in this preference panel. Great, right? Well don’t go popping the champagne corks yet. Nothing there either! So, after scratching my head a bit, I decided to open up the Preferences for Apple Mail and guess what? The setting is there in the General tab! So just to be sure, I went into the Microsoft Outlook email preferences to see if perhaps there was a setting there: When you set the default browser on the Mac, you go to System Preferences > General to do so:Įasy enough, right? Wrong if you want to do the same thing for the default email client.

Perhaps you need it for a work environment like I do and want to just use the features within Outlook. So the scenario is this: while you like (or dislike) the Apple Mail app, you need to change the default to be a different email client like Microsoft Outlook, Airmail, Thunderbird or something else. Ready? Let’s go! How to Set the Default Email Client in MacOS Sierra & El Capitan It’s important to follow all of the steps or it might not stick (as I found through experience). It’s a bit less intuitive, but the process I map out below does work for MacOS Sierra and El Capitan. Unlike with browsers which typically and periodically prompt you when you launch them to set them as the default browser, setting the default email client on a Mac is a bit of a different process. Unlike setting your default browser on a Mac, setting the default email client is a bit less intuitive. That is, until I clicked on an email link and all of a sudden Apple Mail launched. My Mac came fully configured – even with the latest versions of Microsoft Office which included Outlook (version 15.x) which were to be used in a business environment. While I consider myself to be ambidextrous when it comes to Mac versus PC, I definitely prefer using a Mac whenever I can. I recently started a new job and one of the perks was that I could choose between having a Mac or PC laptop.

What is the default mac email client