Outlook Express & Thunderbird conflict

After reading the posts, I have not found the answer I am in need of. I use both IE and Firefox with XP Pro. The TB is set as default on Firefox, but also dominates when I am using IE. Having read and complied with what I have found here, it(IE) will not recognize the settings I have given it, and continues to bring up TB when I send something from IE.
I want IE to use Outlook Express as it's mail, and Firefox to use TB for mail. Apparently I have overlooked something, or haven't gotten deep enough to find the problem.
Thanks,
Rob

 

I could be wrong but I don't think you can make it work the way you want. When you try to send an email from any type of app, it will always open the default email program. As you've discovered, if Thunderbird is set as the default, that's the one that will be opened regardless of the browser you're using. If you set OE as the default, your browsers will all open OE when you want to send mail from them. It has to be this way or the program wouldn't know which email program to use.

The only way you could do what you want would be if Firefox had a setting in it's options to choose the program you wanted to use regardless of which is the default. It may have an option like that but I'm not aware of it. I know Internet Explorer doesn't have that option (you can select the program you want to use but it'll change it for both browsers). IE will always open the one that's the default.

So, if Firefox would happen to let you select the one you want, you could set OE as the default so it opened when using IE and then select Thunderbird in Firefox's options. I could be wrong but I don't think you can do that. Perhaps there's an extension available for Firefox that would make it work this way for you.

 

Firefox (which I'm using right now) doesn't have a setting to choose an email program. As far as I know, you have one default email program for your system and one default Web browser. You can always run a non-default program, of course. Firefox and Thunderbird are not integrated the way IE and OE are.

Since Rob talks about accessing email from the Web browser, it sounds like he means for the times when be clicks on a mailto link. I think that's a file association issue, where the OS decides what program to launch, not the browser.

Rob, is there a reason you want to run two different email programs...for example, do you have multiple email accounts? If so, Thunderbird can be set up for multiple accounts. (When I tried it, I was bothered that only the first account would be threaded, but it did work.)

Lor