Systems and methods are disclosed herein for identifying an application for opening a file. A first user input indicative of a file selected by a user is received over a user interface. The selected file has an input file type and is an attachment to an email. Data indicative of the input file type is transmitted over a communications network. A reference list of applications is obtained by combining association requests from application developers to associate respective applications with one or more file types, and a matched list is obtained by removing applications from the reference list, each of the removed applications being associated with a set of one or more file types that each mismatch the input file type. The matched list is displayed over the user interface, which receives a second user input indicative of a selected application from the matched list.