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Using Choosy as your default Mail app on OS X

If you use Gmail (or any web-based email for that matter), and have multiple accounts, and use Fluid with each of them, you might have wished for a way to select which account to use when you click mailto links. It turns out that Choosy can help, but it takes a little work.

First, open Mail.app then open the preferences for mail. On the “General” tab is an option for default email reader: click it then click “Select…” from the drop-down menu. Then switch to Finder, navigate to ~/Library/PreferencePanes, right-click Choosy.prefPane and select “Show Package Contents”. Then navigate to Contents/Resources, find Choosy.app, and drag Choosy.app to the file chooser that Mail opened. That’s it!

Next time you do something that triggers a new mail message (such as clicking a mailto link), you’ll have the option of choosing which Fluid-wrapped mail account you want to use.

[UPDATE: this setup seems pretty unstable to me now that I’ve been trying to use it, though I’m not sure if it’s because of Choosy, Fluid, or something else. Stay tuned…]

[UPDATE 2: seems much more stable now, after some combination of reinstalling choosy, logging out and in again, and restarting apps. So YMMV.]