mailto: subject= and body= support in email clients

solrevdev picture solrevdev · Aug 21, 2009 · Viewed 18.7k times · Source

Does anyone know if when sending a html newsletter what kind of support the major email clients have for the subject= and body= parts of the mailto tag?

Answer

Matthew Glidden picture Matthew Glidden · Feb 17, 2010

The behavior varies by both email client and source application. Here's a likely enough example from my own system, using pjp's link.

<a href="mailto:[email protected]?subject=Hello%20People">Send Mail</a>
  • Mailto link followed within Outlook client successfully fills subject
  • Mailto link followed in IE successfully fills subject for Outlook client
  • Mailto link followed in Firefox fails for same Outlook client (subject text remains part of "TO" field)

I tried the same link in HTML emails read by gmail and Yahoo web clients.

  • Gmail correctly opens a new message with desired subject
  • Yahoo pre-fills the subject, but truncates at the space ("Hello" only)

That much variation on just one computer makes embedded mailto tricky to use. I bet that's why many email newsletters provide a "View as a web page" link in the header.