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Is there an easy way (without having to research and install 3rd party software) for non techie users to be able to set their email client to Gmail, AOL, etc? I know a lot of people who prefer to use their email in the browser without using a desktop client. If you click on a mailto: link without your desktop client set up it will launch the setup process, it's not a great user experience.

Are there better alternatives than using "mailto"?

I hate to point to Google, but they have a format that allows prompting in Chrome whether to associate mailto to that webapp. Microsoft/Outlook.com/Hotmail doesn't prompt for it (and apparently there's no way short of JS-whipping that will just accept mailto if you want to do it manually), but I have seen Yahoo prompting for that.
To be fair, mailto: is handled the worst possible way on webmail.

It should be relatively easy for the browser to have a little envelope icon in the address bar when you're on a major webmail site. Such an icon, when clicked, could offer to register that webmail service as your mailto: target.