Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Mail Link (mailto:)

The mailto protocol can be used in an a element to automatically send an email message to the recipient, using the browser’s email application or an external email application. Note that the browser must be configured to support this protocol, so it will not work for all users. The mailto protocol has the following components:

mailto:username@domain

A typical mail link might look like this:

<a href="mailto:[e-mail]">Send Jennifer email</a>

You can also experiment with adding information within the mailto URL that automatically fills in standard email fields such as Subject or cc:.

mailto:username@domain?subject=subject

mailto:username@domain?cc=person1

mailto:username@domain?bcc=person2

mailto:username@domain?body=body

Additional variables are appended to the string with an ampersand (&) symbol as shown:

mailto:username@domain?subject=subject&cc=person1&body=body

In XHTML, the ampersand (&) symbol must be escaped—that is, expressed as a character entity (&) in the string—for the document to be valid. The same link in XHTML would be marked up like this:

mailto:username@domain?subject=subject&cc=person1&body=body

Spaces within subject lines need to be written as %20 (the space character in hexadecimal notation). The following sample mail link employs these additions:

    <a href="mailto:[e-mail]?subject=Like%20your%20book">Email for
    Jen</a>

Warning

When you put a link to an email address on a web page, the address is prone to getting “spidered” (automatically ...