Preventing Apple’s Mail App from opening every time you click an email address (in less than 5 minutes)!
Despite all of its greatness and importance in the market, Apple is not recognized as the most populist of companies — as you can see from some of its controversial decisions, such as removing the P2 entry from its smartphones and using some unique connections in their Macbooks (cof cof thunderbolt).
Certain things, however, seem comical as they would be so simple to be solved but were just ignored. One of these is a behavior present on the Mac OS that automatically opens the Mail application every time the user clicks on an email address (inside an xlsx document, for example).
It seems insignificant to deal with this issue, but this “feature” becomes annoying sometimes, and it just doesn’t exist an official way to disable it — even if the user will not make use of the application. We will now solve it in a chuckle and improvised way, but that will serve as a relief for this pain.
Step 1: Open the Automator App, select “New Document” and create a new application
Step 2: Select the “Save” option, input a name and save your application in the “Applications” folder (yes, without doing anything!)
Step 3: With the project saved, in the left corner select the “Utilities” tab > “Quit Application” and select the app we just created (in this case, DoNothing.app)
Step 4: Save the project again and close the Automator;
Step 5: Open the Apple’s Mail app, go to “Preferences” and set the app we just created as “Default email client” (you may need to sign before accessing the preferences)
Ready! Close the application and realize that now when you click on an email address … voilà! Nothing happens! The application we just created simply opens and closes, without doing absolutely N-O-T-H-I-N-G! We have just created a solution that solves a problem by not taking any action!
If you have any questions, feel free to contact me or leave a comment. It is worth remembering that this is certainly not the most elegant solution and probably not the most correct, but it works while the fruit company we love and hate does not present us with a valid alternative!
This article is also available in Portuguese: https://medium.com/@andreOta/impedindo-que-o-mail-da-apple-abra-toda-vez-que-voc%C3%AA-clica-em-um-endere%C3%A7o-de-email-em-menos-de-5-25d12aa48098