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Tip from the Webmaster - Email Links

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Every once in a while, I get an email message from a member telling me that they can't click on e-mail links (on this website or others) to send an email. E-mail links on websites require that your computer has an email program installed. Examples of these are Outlook, Thunderbird, and Windows Live Mail on Windows computers or Apple Mail on Macs.

If you have a Google Mail or Yahoo email account, you probably use a browser (like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox) to manage your mail. This is called web mail. Links from website pages won't work with web mail.

You can still send emails to the links that you see on web pages, but it requires a little bit of work. When you point your cursor at the email link, there's usually a pop-out near the cursor or information on the STATUS line of your browser (the bottom line - but you have to turn it on). Once you see the email address in the pop-out or status line, jot it down, go to your web mail. program, start a new message and type the address into the TO or CC field.

If you'd like the convenience of being able to click on email links and go directly to your email, you might want to look into getting an email client program for your Windows computer. A good article on the top 11 free programs can be viewed here. -- Rick Black, November 5 2016

Friday, July 20, 2018 - An Update

I had another question this morning from a member who wanted to know why when clicking on the little envelope icons next to a name on the MAFCA website that it didn't take him to Gmail, his email program. I explained the situation as I documented in my original email link tip, above..

Then I began to wonder if anything had changed since I wrote that hint several years ago. So I did a bit of googling to find some answers. I followed several tips that supposedly showed how you could set up Google Chrome so that when you click on a "mailto" link (an envelope icon or underlined email), it would go to Gmail instead of trying to find Outlook or Apple Mail on your computer. Unfortunately, none of those solutions worked for me - and none of them mentioned what version of Chrome they applied to (my test machine runs Window 7 and I have Google Chrome 67.1, the most current version.)

Not to be deterred, I googled again but this time for Mozilla Firefox, which is also on my test machine - I have the latest version, 61.0. And I found a link that was helpful, although it didn't exactly match my current version. But it DID let me change the "mailto" link so that when I clicked on one, instead of trying to run Outlook, it opened my Gmail account!

If you're a Windows user and have Firefox as one of your browsers, you may want to give this a try. The page with the instructions was:
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-program-used-open-email-links
or if you prefer, you can open a PDF of that page by clicking here (in case that page goes away!)

Let me know if it works for you!

Rick Black
Webmaster @ mafca.com

Last Updated: 01/06/2020