249367 - See 235380: Use HKCU instead of HKLM for default email client settings on XP

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Preferences, enhancement)

Description

[Sander Goudswaard]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040626 Firefox/0.9.1
Build Identifier: 0.7.1 (20040626)

As in bug 235380, can Thunderbird use HKCU instead of HKLM to set the default
email client, so separate users can have separate email clients as default?

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
Enhancement.

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

As I noted in the referenced bug 235380, the desired feature is not actually 
supported by Windows XP (or Win2K-SP3+).  See bug 220865 comment 6.

Current Thunderbird does the same thing as current Mozilla Mail/News -- it will 
write its name to the default value in HKCU\Software\Clients\Mail, as well as in 
HKLM\Software\Clients\Mail.  Windows ignores the HKCU value, as do every 
application I'm aware of.

I recommend closing this bug as WFM because TB does in fact write the key that 
would have the desired effect, if Windows utilized it.

I do not know what specific effect the Firefox patch for 235380 has.

Comment 2

[Scott MacGregor]

Mike's right.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

(In reply to comment #6)
> Windows ignores the HKCU value, as do every application I'm aware of.

A slight update to this -- Windows itself (e.g. right-click on file, choose 
Send To > Mail Recipient) and Internet Explorer (File|Send|... by email) *do* 
use the MAPI client specified in the HKCU branch; at least some other 
applications (I've only tested Office 98 and Office 2000) do not.

I would've *sworn* that the HKCU branch wasn't read by anything...

See bug 178770 about issues when some *other* mailer is made the default after 
Moz, since most clients do not update the HKCU branch.