Office and Outlook updates change default email program!

[John Navas]

One of my clients who uses Thunderbird for email has repeatedly
complained that the default email client is getting changed to Outlook
(2003).

Preferences in both Outlook and Thunderbird were set correctly, so I'd
been assuming that my client must inadvertently be doing something to
cause this.

However, I finally narrowed the problem down to Office Update --
whenever an Outlook update is applied, or possibly even an Office
update, the update process changes the default email program from
Thunderbird to Outlook.

This has caused considerable grief for my client, who has had lots of
email not get sent because of inadvertently using Outlook.

In searching the Web for info the only thing I found was
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forumarchives/officeupdate/Jan2006/post25408594.asp
which confirms the problem but has nothing on how to prevent it.
But I've now found both the description of the problem and the solution:

"Outlook 2003 is incorrectly configured as the default mail client every
time that you perform an Office installation or Office update that
modifies Outlook" <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933450/en-us>

I'm posting this information here in the hope that it might help save
someone else the grief.

 

[Gordon]

One of my clients who uses Thunderbird for email has repeatedly
complained that the default email client is getting changed to Outlook
(2003).

Preferences in both Outlook and Thunderbird were set correctly, so I'd
been assuming that my client must inadvertently be doing something to
cause this.

However, I finally narrowed the problem down to Office Update --
whenever an Outlook update is applied, or possibly even an Office
update, the update process changes the default email program from
Thunderbird to Outlook.

This has caused considerable grief for my client, who has had lots of
email not get sent because of inadvertently using Outlook.

In searching the Web for info the only thing I found was
http://www.eggheadcafe.com/forumarchives/officeupdate/Jan2006/post25408594.asp
which confirms the problem but has nothing on how to prevent it.
But I've now found both the description of the problem and the solution:

"Outlook 2003 is incorrectly configured as the default mail client every
time that you perform an Office installation or Office update that
modifies Outlook" <http://support.microsoft.com/kb/933450/en-us>

I'm posting this information here in the hope that it might help save
someone else the grief.

If your client is not using Outlook for anything else then he can uninstall
it. If he needs a Calendar and Tasks application then he could try the
Mozilla Lightning extension which (IMHO) is very near the functionality of
Outlook....
get it here:

Lightning Calendar Extension:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313

 

[Brian Tillman]

One of my clients who uses Thunderbird for email has repeatedly
complained that the default email client is getting changed to Outlook
(2003). ....snip...
However, I finally narrowed the problem down to Office Update --
whenever an Outlook update is applied, or possibly even an Office
update, the update process changes the default email program from
Thunderbird to Outlook.

I don't think that's all that unusual. I've seen it happen before and it's
not a surprise to me. Simply resetting the default mail program (and
possibly repairing the URL file types) should put things back to what you
want.