Google Music Canceled, Panic and Resolution

I love Google Music. I’ve been using it since the day (or the month) it came out and I will most likely be using it until it goes away (or I die, one of the two). I’ve built up a large number of playlists and a library. I have go to playlists for when I’m down or when I need to get into that “Work” mode. I have never canceled the service and I still get the promotional price.

And then Google Music was canceled

Imagine my surprised panic this morning when I found the following in my inbox:

Google Music Subscription has been canceled.
WHAT?!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo!!!!

Egagh! Wha? Panic panic panic panic… what? Why has this happened to me?! WHY?!!!!

If they canceled my order, did they kill my promotional price?

Still panicking I went and searched through my emails from the last several days. I found the following email regarding my payment method not working (those credit cards, always expiring).

Google Music Order is on Hold Email
My order is on hold and will be canceled. Thank goodness for this Fix button.

They gave me a whole day to update my payment method. Why hadn’t I done it? Oh, yeah, the day that they gave me was Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is quite possibly one of the busiest days of the year (besides Christmas).

Excellent! The email that Google sent me includes a “Fix or Retry now” button. This should be able to “Fix” the issue! Unfortunately, no. There was no information on the resulting page that indicated or alluded to how to fix the issue.

So I did what any other normal extremely panicked person would do. I started up a support chat with Googles Customer Service.

The Customer Service Representative was very nice. They told me that I should be able to “Resubscribe” to Google Music and that I should be able to maintain my promotional price.

So that’s what I did. I visited https://music.google.com. There was a friendly banner right at the top asking me if I wanted to resubscribe. So I resubscribed and everything is great – panic subsided.

That said I do have a couple of suggestions based on this experience.

  1. If you are going to provide a “Fix” button… then at the very least it should point the user to how to fix the problem. A simple “Order Canceled by mistake?” would’ve done wonders in my situation.
  2. Maybe give the user more than a day to fix the issue? Especially if the day you give them just happens to be a national holiday.

MailTo Links Not Working Correctly

Backstory

Once upon a time there was a person named Jeremy. He used Google Chrome as a browser. He was very happy. One day Jeremy clicked on a mailto: link. Some program (Google Chrome or Windows) helpfully asked how it could handle that action. Jeremy, who hates modal windows and was not paying attention, hastily clicked on the first thing that looked like it would close the modal. He soon found that his hasty actions lead to a larger problem. Now, mailto: links did not do anything when clicked on within Google Chrome.

Present Day

(Spoiler: Jeremy is me.)
Today I got fed up with mailto: links not working as they should in Google Chrome. So I went looking for a solution. I found several different potential solutions. My goal was to get mailto: links to open in Mozilla Thunderbird.

  1. Remove the mailto: handler from chrome://settings/handlers.

    I tried this, unfortunately there were no handlers listed under: chrome://settings/handlers.

  2. Register a new setting with registerProtocolHandler

    I stumbled upon this Paul Irish post. However, it seemed hacky to use a handler to open Thunderbird.

  3. Finally

    I decided to take a look at my Windows settings. I’m using Windows 10 so I brought up the Start Menu and searched for “Default Programs”. I found Control Panel\Programs\Default Programs. From there I saw an option to “Associate a file type or protocol with a specific program”. This led me to Control Panel\Programs\Default Programs\Set Associations which displays a LONG list of associations, and unfortunately no intuitive way to search through them. So I scrolled and scrolled and eventually found an option named “MAILTO”.

Mail To Default Association
The Current Default is now Thunderbird

Lo and behold the Current Default for this option was set to “Google Chrome”. That looked suspicious. So… I changed the Current Default to “Thunderbird”. Saved the setting, restarted Google Chrome, and BOOM, mailto: links started working correctly.