Do you prefer Gmail for managing email on your Mac? I don’t find it as flexible as Mail, but I respect your preference. As such, you might not like it when Mail appears after you click an email link or try to share by email.

It’s possible to make Gmail your default email reader and have a Gmail compose window appear instead. Here’s how…

Change Default Email Reader

The Default Email Reader setting is in Mail, so you must at least open it once. Go to Preferences or Settings in the Mail menu.

In the General section, choose your web browser as the Default email reader. Since a web browser isn’t normally an email application, click Select and then choose the browser from your Applications.

Set Protocol Handler

Setting Gmail as the default works best in Google Chrome or a Chromium browser, such as Brave, Edge, or Arc. When on the Gmail website, look for a “Venn diamondgram” on the right side of the address bar (as shown in the green box above), which refers to Protocol Handlers.

Click this button and Allow “mail.gmail.com to open all email links.” If you don’t see the highlighted button, see the next section below.

Stop Ignoring Handler Requests

If you’ve ever clicked this handler button while on a website and then escaped it, that website was added to a list that would ignore handler requests. In fact, there appears to be no way to escape the handler dialog and ensure the button remains in the toolbar — which seems like a bug.

The Protocol Handlers may be hidden with no way to navigate to it, so you may need to enter its URL directly. To do so, go to your address bar and enter chrome://settings/handlers.

On the resulting page, look for mail.google.com. If the site is ignored, click the X to remove it from the list; if it was denied, click ︙ and Remove. Then, return to Gmail (or reload the page) and follow the instructions above.

Hopefully this helps you be more productive. If you’d like to reconsider Mail, I would be happy to help you get acquainted.