Links in emails won’t open — what to do

Posted on: October 20th, 2008

If you use an email client software such as Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Outlook, Windows Mail, etc and you click on a link in an email but nothing happens, then this article will show you how to fix that.

This issue is almost always caused by a corruption in the settings that specify what is the default browser – that is the browser that will start up when you click on a link. In Windows originally is set to Internet Explorer and about 70% of people has that program as their default browser. Others, including myself, prefer Mozilla Firefox or other non-Microsoft made browsers.

To fix this issue (this applies to Windows XP and Windows Vista – I have no information for other versions of Windows) you need to go to the Program Access and Defaults icon in the Control Panel.

Here’s how to do it in XP:
http://teamtutorials.com/windows-tutorials/set-windows-xp-program-access-and-defaults

And here’s the procedure in Vista:
http://www.vista4beginners.com/set-program-access-computer-defaults

When you do this you need to reselect the program you want to set as default browser and click OK.

About 90% of the time this will take care of the problem. If it doesn’t then there’re probably some more serious registry corruption, or the computer is infected. That’s when you’d need to call us.