Creating Advanced XHTML Email Links: Include Subject, CC, BCC, and Email Body

By  on  

Creating email links is a piece of cake, right? It's as simple as:

<a href="mailto:live@wembley.com">Email Oasis</a>

Everyone knows this. Did you know, however, that you can include subject, CC, BCC, and email body text information in the link as well? Using a querystring-like syntax, you can do more with that simple link.

<a href="mailto:live@wembley.com">Email Oasis</a>

<!-- add the subject -->
<a href="mailto:live@wembley.com?Subject=Your Next Show">Email Oasis</a>

<!-- add the cc's and bcc's -->
<a href="mailto:live@wembley.com?Subject=Your Next Show&CC=johnl@beatles.com&BCC=paulm@wings.com">Email Oasis</a>

<!-- add some default body text -->
<a href="mailto:live@wembley.com?Subject=Your Next Show&CC=johnl@beatles.com&BCC=paulm@wings.com&Body=I can't wait for the next show!">Email Oasis</a>

Remember that simply placing email addresses on a page without encoding them first is like simply emailing spammers your email address. Encode your email addresses!

Recent Features

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Simple Slideshow Using MooTools

    One excellent way to add dynamism to any website is to implement a slideshow featuring images or sliding content. Of course there are numerous slideshow plugins available but many of them can be overkill if you want to do simple slideshow without controls or events.

  • By
    Detect Vendor Prefix with JavaScript

    Regardless of our position on vendor prefixes, we have to live with them and occasionally use them to make things work.  These prefixes can be used in two formats:  the CSS format (-moz-, as in -moz-element) and the JS format (navigator.mozApps).  The awesome X-Tag project has...

Discussion

  1. Your post here saved me some time at work, so thanks. I can just never remember if its PHP or URL encoding that is choosy about how CC is written (cc, CC, or Cc).

  2. garrobo

    George,

    I need help on getting a comment system like the one I’m writing on, my question to you is how to get it to my website is there a code that I need to download or do I need to purchase it let me know
    I’m in love with it. thanks

  3. I’d like to thank you, for this tutorial, as a newbie in xhtml, its a lot of thing i never know before, thanks for this ‘mailing’ tutorial. Im sorry for this bad english

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!