There was a time years ago when I used Outlook for email. I never liked it. Then I discovered Thunderbird, and I liked that better. Eventually, as web mail improved, I found that I really only used Gmail in Firefox and on my cell phone. I gave up on desktop email clients, and never looked back.

However, there remains the annoyance peculiar to Windows, of the default program setting for email links. This would be those mailto: links you find in some documents and on Web pages. Those links will continue to open in Outlook or Outlook Express even if you don't have those programs configured with your email provider.

You can change Firefox through the Tools > Options menu to use Gmail or Ymail to open mailto: links. But not so with Word or Adobe Reader. Until recently, my only recourse was to copy and paste these mailto: links into Firefox.

Well, now there's a better way. It's a free program called Affixa, and it changes your Windows system default for mailto: links so that Gmail, Ymail or Windows Live Mail opens automatically. You can select files from your desktop file explorer and email them with just a click. And for files that surpass the email attachment size limit, Affixa integrates with Drop.io to automatically create a Drop of the file and email the download link to the recipient. Slick!

There is a premium version of Affixa which adds some extra options. It costs two British Pounds per year, which is currently about $3.30. Purchase is through Google Checkout and is pretty hassle-free.

The free version works great, but after I thought about it I decided that $3.30/yr is a very cheap way to show my appreciation to the developer for a really useful utility.

Since Posterous is an email-driven blogging platform, I thought that perhaps some of you in the Posterous community might appreciate a utility like this.