Industry guru Dave Taylor offers free tech support on a wide variety of technical and business topics, including HTML, Apple iPhone, online advertising, Cascading Style Sheets, Web design, management, Unix, Linux, search engine optimization, online dating, Mac OS X, shell script programming and Microsoft Windows.

Can I have a mailto link specify a subject and body?

Dave, I have a email link on a web page. Set so when you click it, the email opens with the address and subject line populated. I want to have the cursor OR Hello show up in the Body of the email. I am told 'ONLY' with forms but I am sure I did this years ago. Here is what I have so far:

"mailto:me@my-addr.com?Subject=Dear Kirk"

Do you know the code to finish it off?

Dave's Answer:

First off, I have two articles worth reading in this regard: Avoid spam by omitting mailto links and hiding email addresses in HTML forms.

If you still want to use a mailto: link, then it turns out that there's quite a rich language of different options you can specify to get the mailto link to work just as you desire.

According to what I found out about mailto links, you can specify more than one recipient by listing them as a comma-separated list (skip spaces, though), like this: mailto:joe@hisaddr.com,sue@heraddr.com,mary@heraddr.com. Easily done.

Now, for anything that would be passing additional information, you need to use the form ?name=value and if you specify more than one variable, you need to separate them with &, just as if you were specifying a method="get" form, actually.

So, to specify the subject, you already know that you use subject=something, but you can also specify the "Cc" or "Bcc" recipients with, logically enough, cc=some@addr.com, or bcc=someone@else.com.

Finally, and this is what you asked about in the first place, to specify the body of the message, use body=. In fact, you can apparently specify more than one line of the body by using body= more than one time in the URL. So, putting it all together:

mailto:larry,dan?cc=mike&bcc=sue&subject=test&body=type+your&body=message+here

Try that, see how it works for you!

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Comments

Thanks for the useful information. But here I want to ask one more question. While mentioning "body=" I want to change the line. I used br tag of html for it but instead of breaking the line, the tag is displayed as it is. Is there any method to break the line while using "body="

Posted by: Amit Dua at September 17, 2005 4:07 PM

Amit, try using more than one body attribute, as shown in the very last example. It should let you break it into multiple lines. As you've found, you can't slip HTML into it, though, or you'll get the HTML source itself in the resultant message.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at September 17, 2005 9:50 PM

Hi Dave,

I hav ea small problem with the mailto link. How can I make the body content to be bold. Can you help me please.

Thanks.
Arun

Posted by: Arun at October 19, 2005 8:14 PM

Don't believe you can do that, Arun. Sorry.

Posted by: Dave Taylor at October 19, 2005 10:35 PM

oops!... :(

Anyway. Thanks for the help Dave. :)

Regards,
Arun

Posted by: Arun at October 20, 2005 9:23 PM

I'm trying to use multiple "body=" tags to break up the text but I always only get the text of the last one to appear in the email. What's wrong?

Posted by: Elise at November 11, 2005 12:39 AM

I think that multiple body= attributes is going to be supported by some Web browsers / email programs, but not others. I'd either experiment with more browser/OS/email combinations or just figure out how to have one really long body= attribute. Good luck!

Posted by: Dave Taylor at November 11, 2005 7:05 AM

%0A == line break in a mailto link

example HREF:

mailto:addy@gmail.com?subject=Some Kind Of Subject&body=Here is my email body and %0Aa %0Afew %0Aline %0Abreaks.

Posted by: alan at November 30, 2005 10:02 PM

Thank you, Alan, %0A works just fine to break the body into multiple lines of text in a mailto command.

Posted by: Ryan at July 28, 2006 1:36 PM

I have this mailto link that I'm trying to use:

and in the resulting Thunderbird compose msg window I get the output a) in the TO: address field, b) in the CC: adress field and c) in the msg body:

a) someone@someadd.com
b)someoneelse"@someotheradd.com?subject=some subject?body=Hello+you!
c)Thanks for0%Anice0��

Posted by: Rawd at November 7, 2006 6:14 PM

Thank you! very well explained and functional!

Posted by: Lauren at January 27, 2007 7:36 AM

This doesnt seem to work in IE7. What is the deal with IE7, is this a known problem, and is there a fix? please help!

Posted by: Mike M at January 31, 2007 2:43 PM

Sir,

How can i use charchetr "&" inside body?

If i use inside the body , It will take automatically as separator.

Posted by: Mathan at March 1, 2007 6:57 PM

I have to insert a URL in the body of a mail using mailto tag. What I am getting is just the plain text and not the hyperlink in the body.
Are there any attributes for this in the bosy tag?
can you help me with this?

Thanks.

Posted by: Harshad at March 13, 2007 1:30 AM

using extra body tags doesn't work to create new lines for me on Mac Mail program

Posted by: Adam at March 29, 2007 12:19 PM

hi,
i am using mailto:someone@somewhere.com?Subject=something

While this seems to work fine for mail editors such as outlook the subject doesn't get recognized in gmail or yahoo.is there a work around??

Thanks,
Chaitanya

Posted by: chaitanya at June 1, 2007 3:31 AM

Hi,

I need to display the test within "" inside the body of the mail using mailto tag..

can you help me..

Posted by: karthik at October 4, 2007 3:32 AM

I see a lot of questions concerning sneaking HTML into the mail, for example hyperlinks and making text bold. I'd say that this is by defintion impossible, because you're making a TEXT email. No mark-up whatso-ever...

Posted by: mvdv at February 26, 2008 2:56 AM

Hi! Can you please help me. I need to pass the body of mailto: from a textbox. Is this possible? I'm using ASP.Net. Can you please send me the code if possible. Thank you so much in advance.

Posted by: Ronaldo at April 30, 2008 11:42 AM

I have to insert a URL in the body of a mail using mailto tag. What I am getting is just the plain text and not the hyperlink in the body.

Posted by: vinod at May 9, 2008 1:04 AM

Hi,

Is this format supposed to work for Macs?

thanks,
Aju

Posted by: Aj at May 23, 2008 11:44 AM

From the article (and comments abound) I was able to create a mailto: link that works perfectly for our function! Terrific advice! Will be back in the future.

Posted by: Beth at November 21, 2008 7:57 AM

Hello,
Can you control the position of the cursor in Microsoft Outlook/express via mailto:

Posted by: Richard Hefter at February 10, 2009 10:52 AM

For some reason

i have a few email links

yet some works and some don't, they're just plain text

why is this so?

Posted by: Toan Duong at February 22, 2009 6:04 PM

Hi, This funcion is not working in IE7 at all. Its just displaying the email id. The subject and the body is not displayed. Is this a known problem, and is there a fix? please help! Urgent

Posted by: Shiva at March 18, 2009 7:45 AM

THANK YOU for the %0A code to be used in the mailto link!!! It worked great! I had been searching for this solution for hours!

Posted by: Cheryl at April 10, 2009 8:52 AM

Hi dave taylor,

I have a problem in mailto reply. When I click on a link to send email through mailto then I need some information populated in body field which is not properly display in formatted. What should I do. I need to show body text with formatted text. Please if you have a answer then let me know.

Thanks..

Posted by: dave at April 27, 2009 11:09 PM

How to format the body message using mailto like underline and making the text bold

Posted by: Princy Khandelwal at June 17, 2009 6:09 AM

As I found out html tags within body attribute works well with Mozilla Thunderbird but not with Outlook.

Posted by: miro lago at July 17, 2009 6:55 AM

How can we add attachments to mailto tag

Thanks,
Ramana.PV

Posted by: Ramana.PV at July 30, 2009 7:15 AM

I have a "canned" email as a hyperlink in Excel. The problem I have now is "the powers that be" want a change to the canned email. There are many carriage returns and a large boby with an additional signature block at the bottom. Excel will only allow a certain amount of characters in the body leaving me with half a message.

How can I get my whole message in the body?

John.

Posted by: John at August 25, 2009 12:01 PM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!