The Full mailto Link Syntax
For a small project, I had to create a smart mailto
link to make my life a bit easier. I wanted the mailto link to hold not only a to and the subject (I’d figured that much out) but a multi-lined body too. Turns out that is pretty darn easy to do. So, for my own reference, and yours, here’s a complete overview of everything possible with a mailto link.
There are a couple of variables you can use, which you’d have to do in standard URL format, remember to properly encode the &
if you care about the validity of your HTML, so you use &
in that case. Here’s the full mailto link syntax:
[code lang=”html”]<a href="mailto:info@example.com?subject=subject&cc=cc@example.com">mail link</a>[/code]
Here are the variables you can use in mailto links:
mailto: | to set the recipient, or recipients, separate with comma |
&cc= | to set the CC recipient(s) |
&bcc= | to set the BCC recipient(s) |
&subject= | to set the email subject, URL encode for longer sentences, so replace spaces with %20, etc. |
&body= | to set the body of the message, you can add entire sentences here, including line breaks. Line breaks should be converted to %0A . |
Some mailto link examples
A simple mailto link:
[code lang=”html”]<a href="mailto:info@example.com">mail link</a>[/code]
mailto link with subject:
[code lang=”html”]<a href="mailto:info@example.com?subject=email%20subject">mail link</a>[/code]
mailto link with multiple recipients:
[code lang=”html”]<a href="mailto:info@example.com,email@example.com">mail link</a>[/code]
mailto link with a CC:
[code lang=”html”]<a href="mailto:info@example.com?cc=email2@example.com">mail link</a>[/code]
A mailto link with message body already started:
[code lang=”html”]<a href="mailto:info@example.com?body=these%20mailto%20links%20are%20cool">
e-mail link
</a>[/code]
A mailto link with 3 lines of message body:
[code lang=”html”]<a href="mailto:info@example.com?body=these%20mailto%0Alinks%20are%0Acool">
mail links
</a>[/code]
A mailto link with 3 lines of message body and a BCC:
[code lang=”html”]<a href="mailto:info@example.com?bcc=mail2@example.com
&body=these%20mailto%0Alinks%20are%0Acool">
mailto links
</a>[/code]
As you can see, you can add as many of these as you want and stack them on top of each other. Remember that after the email address you’ll use a question mark to prefix the first variable, and ampersands ( & ) for each consecutive variable.
Happy coding and mailing!
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