How to Change the Default Gmail Account when Opening Email Links

You likely already know how to have Gmail as the default mail client to open email links when you click them. That is to say when you see someone’s email linked within a web-page and you click it, it opens gmail and pre-populates it with the address, rather than opening some archaic desktop email client. If you haven’t set that up yet then the process is very simple and hubspot does a good job of explaining the setup process.

But when you have multiple gmail addresses signed in on the same computer it’s possible that clicking those links opens the wrong gmail account. The good news is that you can change the default gmail address it uses. The only bad news is that you cannot choose the address in each instance so you’ll want to make it whatever gmail account you use the most.

The process is actually very simple. Gmail auto-assigns a number to the gmail accounts based on the order which you signed into them. You can see that order by going to gmail and looking at the url. The first one logged into will be /0/ the second /1/ etc.

The default address your system uses to open links will be the first one, /0/

In order to change it all you need to do is log out of all your gmail accounts and log back into the gmail account that you want opening links by default first. After that you can add as many other accounts as you’d like.

Hope that helps. If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll be sure to answer.

Cheers.

Peter