How do I use mailto: links in a form?

First off, as far as I can tell, the "method" is ignored when you use a mailto: link, but there's a bigger problem: mailto: links only work when the user's Web browser is configured to have a default email program helper.

This means that if you choose to use this method of getting data from a form, some percentage of your users won't be able to communicate with you at all (including your own setup, from what you say). Further, since there's no CGI script involved, it's impossible to hide any data elements from users and worst of all, the data from the form arrives in the email message from the users as a single, encoded data field.

Instead of a nice series of name=value pairs that's easy to read and understand, all punctuation characters are turned into their hex ascii equivalent values, all spaces are changed into "+" symbols, and so on.

And another problem, since I'm going down the list: spammers that crawl your site will be able to extract the email address and add it to their databases, meaning that you'll get even more spam than you already receive.

If you have the ability to run a CGI script on the server, it's really a much smarter strategy to either find and download a security mail to web script, ask your web hosting company if they have a preconfigured script you can use, or even write one yourself. And tuck your email address into the script itself so that it's not part of the form.

I hope that helps you out!