Update: Two years before this question, a similar question was asked: Effective maximum mailto: body lengths as pointed out by Peter O. Luckily answers of both questions are complementary :-) Browsers evolved a lot in the last two years, therefore we can say this question is an update of the other one ;-)
The specifications does not limit the mailto
command length:
mailto
command is an URL)Therefore the mailto
command length depends on internet browser implementations.
I guess very old browsers could not handle mailto
commands using more than 255 characters well.
However, nowadays, memory size is no longer an issue about mailto
command length.
What is the mailto
max-length of the most common internet browsers?
Should be interesting to see whether browsers converge to the same mailto
length limitation.
Safari and most email clients have no hard limit (depends on available CPU and RAM)
2015 Web Browser Testing:
2015 Email Client Testing:
2017 update
Chrome 61 still works with 2097132 length on macOS (16 GB RAM);
navigator.userAgent;
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_13_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36"
location.href='mailto:?body='+'a'.repeat(2097132);
According to @Chloe on windows (32 GB RAM) it's limited to 1800;
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/61.0.3163.100 Safari/537.36"