How to Set Gmail as Your Default Mail Handler in Vivaldi
I like Vivaldi. It's working out great for me. One sticking point though?
I still use Gmail as my primary email app, and after a brief run-in with Vivaldi's poor calendar syncing, I deactivated their native mail and calendar features entirely.
In a perfect world, Vivaldi wouldn't force you to adopt both at the same time. But here we are.
The problem this creates is that Vivaldi commandeers all your mailto links instead of opening them in your preferred application. In my case, that's directly in Gmail.
I'm publishing this mostly to put the right answer in more search results. I came across a number of old and even some recent Reddit posts and blogs that discuss this but never explicitly say what to do.
Here's the fix.
Step 1. Open the following link in your Vivaldi browser: vivaldi:settings/handlers
Step 2. Go to the section labeled "Email" and set your handler to Gmail.
Step 3. If Gmail isn't listed yet, navigate to gmail.com, click the overlapping diamonds icon in the browser bar, and set Gmail as the handler for email. Then return to settings and confirm it is set it as the default.
There are terminal-based solutions for Linux users, and browser extensions that handle this as well. I, personally, won't be downloading an extension to do something the browser should natively support. But those options exist if you want them.
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