You can send emails directly from Beacon with or without email templates, but when you choose to send an email to someone in Beacon from your own email provider (or when you click an email address on a website), your computer will automatically open the default Mac or Windows email program installed.
What if you prefer to use your Gmail account?
There's two steps involved:
Set your browser to open when you want to send an email
Set Gmail to open the link once the browser opens
Step 1: Change default email program
Mac
On a Mac, you actually change the default email program from inside the default email program... how meta!
Open the Mail app
Click the Mail menu, and then choose Preferences
Open the Default email reader dropdown, and select the browser you'd like to open
Windows 10
Click the Windows button, then the Settings cog wheel
Type 'Default apps' into the search bar
Under the Email header, click to choose the web browser you'd prefer to use for Gmail
Step 2: Set Gmail to open in your browser
The process will be a little different depending on which browser you use. The most common browsers are below.
Note: Beacon does not support Internet Explorer. Please download Microsoft Edge instead (or try Google Chrome, our personal browser of choice).
Chrome
Open Gmail normally in your browser: https://mail.google.com/
A small pop-up should appear to ask if you'd like to allow mail.google.com to open email links. Click 'Allow'.
If you don't see the pop up, there should be a double-diamond shape icon in the far right of your address bar. Click it to show the allow option.
If you don't see either of these, enter this into your address bar: chrome://settings/handlers
Then make sure that 'Allow sites to ask to become default handlers for protocols' is ON, and that there isn't a blocked entry for mail.google.com. If there is, simply remove it and try again.
Edge
Microsoft Edge is built on a similar framework to Chrome, so simply follow the steps above.
If you don't see the double-diamond, type the following into the address bar:
edge://settings/content/handlers
Then make sure that 'Allow sites to ask to become default handlers for protocols' is ON, and that there isn't a blocked entry for mail.google.com. If there is, simply remove it and try again.
Safari
Safari is unfortunately the only major browser that doesn't have a way to open Gmail as default built-in.
Fortunately, there is a simple app available from the Apple App Store (£1.79) that makes it easy to manage: Open in Webmail
Firefox
Click on the Firefox menu (the three lines in the top right), and choose Preferences
Scroll down to Applications, and change the mailto action to 'Use Googlemail' or 'Use Gmail'.
