Last modified: 2023-03-29

Mailto links

Mailto link has following format:

mailto:<email_address>,<email_address2>?<parameter>&<parameter2>

Recipients are separated by comma (,). You can have more than 2 recipients ;).

Additional parameters are possible, such as:

  • cc (carbon copy)
  • bcc (blind carbon copy)
  • subject
  • body

These additional arguments must be separated from the to field with question mark (?).

Example
Basicmailto:jack@example.com
Multiple recipientsmailto:jack@example.com,mark@example.com
CCmailto:jack@example.com?cc=mark@example.com
BCCmailto:jack@example.com?bcc=mark@example.com
Subjectmailto:jack@example.com?subject=subject%20here
Bodymailto:jack@example.com?Body=body%20here
Everythingmailto:jack@example.com,mark@example.com?cc=luke@example.com&bcc=tony@example.com&subject=subject%20here&body=body%20here

You are rather limited in the characters you can put into a HTML link.

Info

At least according to stackoverflow.com and this Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax document, following characters are allowed in HTML link:

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-._~:/?#[]@!&'()*+,;=

If you want other characters, or perhaps you would like to have a reserved character in the subject field, you have to encode the character into %<hex_code>.

Here is a short table of the most used hex codes (full table at HTML URL Encoding Reference):

Hex codeCharacter
%20
%21!
%2D-
%2E.
%3A:
%3F?

Example

subject=Hello there! would become subject=Hello%20there%21