I don’t understand why my computer does this!

I don’t understand why my computer does this? Why won’t you work the way you are supposed to? I don’t want to go to a web browser, I want to reply to an email!

These could be common thoughts that run through your mind when you are trying to reply to our Member Needs Help email - to request responses to the question being asked, or to give the information being asked of you.

While it does not happen on a frequent basis, it is frequent enough that it warrants an explanation.

If you do not have Administrator rights on your machine, you will have to get your IT department involved.

The "request responses" and the "answer question" button use a common protocol called “mailto:” This tells the computer that the user wants to send an email and it will open the appropriate mail program for them to complete this.

Several things can happen at this point:

1. The email program opens a new email with all the appropriate information already populated (this is what we want – everything is all good, and the user can go on their merry way).
2. The computer attempts to open Windows Mail – hang on a minute, I don’t use windows mail, I use outlook? Therefore an account creation dialog box comes up for you to set up an account with Windows Mail. This occurs when your default mail program is set to Windows Mail, rather than Microsoft Outlook.
3. The computer attempts to open a web page.

To fix this, type default Apps in your search bar:

This window will open:

You want your mail program to be the default one, in this case, Outlook. If it isn’t, click on the app that is listed there and then you can choose which one is correct.

The above scenario also works for the opening of a web page browser as well.