How To: Open mailto links in Gmail

I just discovered one of the biggest time savers ever.

I use Gmail as my primary email. I have for over a year now. And I send all my emails from Gmail.

But, whenever I click on a mailto link in a webpage, it always opens up in Outlook Express. Yeah, it takes like 2 minutes to open up, and I don’t even use Outlook Express. It is just the default mail client on Windows XP. I try to look at links before I click on them, but a lot of the time it just happens. Call me click-happy.

So how do you make it work so when you click on a mailto email link that it opens up in Gmail?

The Gmail notifier does this, but I hate leaving stuff running in my taskbar all the time, especially when I always have Gmail open in a tab in Firefox.

So what other solutions are there?

I installed Google Talk sometime ago to take advantage of some feature. I don’t have it running all the time, and I think I might have used it twice before now (I just chat in Gmail or Pidgin). But it has a nifty little feature that alters the system setting to allow all mailto links to open in Gmail.

And Voila! Click on a mailto link like this one, and watch it open in Gmail!