mailto Protocol

Opens a client's e-mail system and begins a new email message.

Syntax

mailto:sAddress[sHeaders]

Tokens

sAddress
One or more valid e-mail addresses separated by a semicolon. You must use Internet-safe characters, such as %20 for the space character.
sHeaders
Optional. One or more name-value pairs. The first pair should be prefixed by a "?" and any additional pairs should be prefixed by a "&". The name can be one of the following strings.
subject
Text to appear in the subject line of the message.
body
Text to appear in the body of the message.
CC
Addresses to be included in the "cc" (carbon copy) section of the message.
BCC
Addresses to be included in the "bcc" (blind carbon copy) section of the message.

Remarks

Windows Internet Explorer 7 and later. You must percent-encode all URL-reserved characters within a mailto: address. For example, the number sign (#) is used as a fragment identifier in URLs. When processing an address such as some#one@example.com, Internet Explorer copies only the portion up to the number sign into the mail client; the fragment portion including the number sign is ignored. This behavior is by design.

For more information on the mailto protocol, see RFC 2368 World Wide Web link.

Examples

The following example shows a mailto URL that will prepare an e-mail message when typed into the Internet Explorer address bar.

mailto:user@example.com?subject=Message Title&body=Message Content

The following example shows a link that will prepare an e-mail message.

<a href="mailto:user@example.com?
    subject=MessageTitle&amp;
    body=Message Content">
    Contact Us</a>

The following example shows how to use an HTML form to create an e-mail message.

<form action="mailto:user@example.com" method="get">
<input name="subject" type="hidden" value="Message Title">

Feedback:<br/>
<textarea name=body cols="40">
Please share your thoughts here
and then choose Send Feedback.
</textarea>

<input type="submit" value="Send Feedback">
</form>
Tags :


Community Content

danielszabo1981
Attachments

There is no official way to attach files using "mailto" protocol. Most likely because of the security reasons.

However some email clients do accept the attachment parameter with the file in quotes i.e. attachment="C:\fileName.txt" such as outlook 98.

Tags :

Thomas Lee
Multiline Body
To apply a multi line message in the body use can use the hex values for carriage return and line feed (%0D%0A).

danielszabo1981
Successful Outlook 2003 Mailto Attachment Syntax

Outlook 2003 mailto:'s "&Attachment" tag relies on double quotes:

<a href='mailto:name@domain.com?Subject=SubjTxt&Body=Bod_Txt&Attachment=""C:\file.txt"" '>

Attach with double-quotes!

</a>

Tags :

Kurt L Hudson
Typo in first example
The double-quotes at the end of the first example in this article appears to be a typo. mailto:user@example.com?subject=Message Title&body=Message Content" If I remove the double quotes at the end, then things work fine.

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