Chris Hubbard

There is a very convenient button on my keyboard for launching my email client.  However, if I have a remote desktop session running at the same time, the key sequence will get sent to the remote machine which would never have an email client configured and I have to cancel through several dialogs while Outlook Express is insisting that you create an account so that it can get started.  This has annoyed me for years.

I finally spent the time to figure out how to stop this behavior.  Windows will use the email client setup in Internet Explorer’s programs configuration, which defaults to Outlook Express.

I used Process Monitor to watch for registry access.  First I selected only to monitor registry changes.  Then I included iexplore.exe and then excluded all the registry operations that I was not interested in.  When I launched the options dialog in IE, I saw that it was enumerating the [HKLM\SOFTWARE\Clients\Mail] registry path.  I went to that path and saw that the default value was “Outlook Express” just like it is displayed in the options dialog.

I cleared the default value and went back to IE and verified that the “E-Mail” program entry was cleared.  I hit the email button and…nothing!  Just what I wanted!  Now I have to remember this so that I can clear this setting when I connect to a new server (hence the reason for this post)!