[SOLVED] Outlook 2016 not recognized as default mail client

[HCHTech]

I spent my Sunday doing some things I've been putting off for a while, one of which was upgrading my aging installation of Outlook 2010. This is my main "business computer", that runs Win 7, Quickbooks 2016, Office, Adobe Acrobat, and a bunch of other softwares I've collected throughout the years. The computer is about 4 years old, but It's windows installation is more recent, about 2 years ago, when I switched to an SSD.

It had a combination of Office 2007 H&S and Outlook 2010 standalone. I've had a MAPS subscription for a while, but just let this one go because everything was working - shoemakers children & all that.

So, I made sure I had a current backup, then uninstalled anything office-related, rebooted, then downloaded the ISO for Office Pro Plus 2016 and completed the install without incident. Activation went through the first time, and all programs open correctly. Outlook opened my PST without complaining and new mail came in as expected. Sending a couple of messages also worked just fine.

Just about to congratulate myself for finally crossing off this to-do item when I tried to right-click on a document and use the "send to mail recipient" function. I was greeted with the "Either there is no default mail client or the current mail client cannot fulfill the messaging request - Please run Microsoft Outlook and set it as the default mail client" dialog.

I opened Outlook to check whether it was set as the default, and indeed it was. I checked in the default programs control panel applet to see if Outlook had all of it's defaults, and it did.

This problem also prevents you from sending invoices from Quickbooks. In fact, Outlook is not shown as an available option for sending invoices.

So - off to Google. I have:

• Tried starting Outlook in safe mode and unsetting/resetting the default checkbox - no change
• Loaded updates for Office - no change.
• Deleted the Microsoft Outlook key under HKLM\Software\clients\mail, then ran a quick repair of Office. No change. I rebooted, did it again and ran a full repair of Office, No change.
• Found a reported bug about this, but it was limited to Windows 10 installs
• Checked the preferences for Adobe Acrobat XI and Adobe Reader DC and set a non-outlook account as the default (I used a gmail account)
• Replaced the "Send to" link with a freshly-created one
• Checked for a known troublemaker add-in from iTunes - it wasn't loaded.
• Tried disabling all Outlook addins as a test - no change
• Checked that I had a compatible version of Quickbooks - I do. 2016_R7 and above are compatible, I have R9
• Edited the Win.ini file to add a [MAIL] section with the MAPI=1 and MAPIX=1 lines.
• I've checked that I did NOT accidentally install the 64-bit version of any of the office programs
• Added the following registry keys.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\MAIL]
"MAPI"="1"
"MAPIX"="1"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows Messaging Subsystem]
"MAPI"="1"
"MAPIX"="1"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\MAIL]
"MAPI"="1"
"MAPIX"="1"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows Messaging Subsystem]
"MAPI"="1"
"MAPIX"="1"

• I have another machine here my assistant remotes into to run Quickbooks. This machine did not previously have Outlook. I installed Office from the same ISO, setup her email account, and everything works fine on that machine - also Windows 7. Outlook is seen as the default, the sendto: feature works and you can send invoices from Quickbooks through Outlook.
• I ran CCleaner to look for any leftover registry entries from the previous installations of Office & Outlook. It found only a few, and deleting them didn't help.

So at this point, I know it's something about my machine, but I'm out of things to try. I would need to plan an entire weekend to do a clean install of Windows, so I'm really hoping to avoid that if I can. The computer is otherwise working ok. For now, I'm sending invoices by printing them to PDF first and sending them manually. Kind of a pain. If anyone thinks of anything I haven't already tried, I'd be grateful.

 

[GTP]

Have you tried a complete uninstall/removal of Office using Geek Uninstaller/RevoUninstaller/BCUninstaller or similar?
Reboot twice (trust me) then run CCleaner and reboot twice again.
Reinstall Office and reboot again. Don't open the application until you reboot! See if it works for you.

 

[Markverhyden]

Did you go into Control Panel>Default Programs>Associate a file type.....

 

[HCHTech]

Have you tried a complete uninstall/removal of Office using Geek Uninstaller/RevoUninstaller/BCUninstaller or similar?
Reboot twice (trust me) then run CCleaner and reboot twice again.
Reinstall Office and reboot again. Don't open the application until you reboot! See if it works for you.

I did a full Revo uninstall using the aggressive option, then walked through the rest of this procedure. Still no good. Then, I remembered I hadn't loaded the Office updates like before, so after downloading the updates, rebooting and opening Outlook, I got the popup about not being the default. This was progress. One click on the "Yes" button and it appears to work. Both the Sendto Mail Recipient and the Outlook option in Quickbooks are working again.

I'll bet it was the Office updates - maybe didn't install correctly, or maybe there was some detritus from the old Office versions. Thanks for the suggestion - I was dreading a clean install!