HTML mailto attribute

The mailto is a quick way to add the facility of receiving feedback from visitor on your web site. With the HTML mailto, you create a link which when clicked by the visitor launches (if it's not already running) their email program with a new email message window. The visitor could then formulate the email message and send it off to you.

Note: HTML Mailto assumes that the visitor has configured an email client (Outlook Express, Netscape Messenger, Thunderbird or any other) to send emails.

In its simplest form, the HTML mailto requires an email address. However, mailto can be made slightly more professional if we use it properly.

The Basic form of HTML mailto

mailto looks like:

Send me an
email

And this is displayed as

A more complex HTML mailto

We will now learn how to create a more complex HTML mailto by adding an email subject and the email body so that it looks a little more professional. And this will definitely save your visitors some typing too!

Send me an email

Careful inspection of the above code will highlight two points. Firstly, the email address is separated from the other information by a ? sign (question mark) and secondly, body and subject properties are themselves separated using an &.

[Those of you familiar with server-side scripting will find a similarity between this mailto tag and the GET method.]

Remember, the prefilled email Subject and email body values can be changed by the visitor! But this fancy mailto looks better than plain one, doesn't it?

In addition to the body and subject, we can also provide HTML mailto with CC (Carbon Copy) and BCC (Blind Carbon Copy). This, as you would have guessed, requires us to append these values to the HTML mailto attribute just like we had done for body and subject. [Refer code and image below]

Send me an email