Why are email links in web pages not working in Windows 8.1?

November 30, 2013 at 04:48PM:

A couple of people have told me that a standard mailto: link on a webpage doesn’t work. It’s a page that’s been fine for several years and one told me the link only stopped working since she got Windows 8.1 The problem happens in both Chrome and MSIE11 (she’s not got Firefox or Safari).

MSIE11 at least gave some response (Chrome just did nothing), this is how she described trying it in MSIE11

“…it asked me if I wanted to give google permission to open the program, I said yes but it still didn’t give me an email box it just took me to the google web page.”

I don’t have Windows 8.1 but the site seems to be OK on Win8.0 (with Firefox).

It’s such a simple, common and standard bit of HTML that I don’t think it can be specific to the web-site. I asked her to try a mailto link on another web site and she got the same problem. I doubt if it’s browser specific, everything is pointing to Win8.1.

I’m trying to establish the scope of the problem, sent her a load of questions and things to try but meanwhile – anyone else using 8.1 and finding this problem?

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