Mailto link generator

More importantly, let me tell you about mailto links so you will know how to generate them yourself.

• What is a mailto link?
• Start with mailto:
• Single recipient
• Multiple recipients
• No recipient
• Characters that divide parameters
• Mailto link with subject
• Spaces and other special characters
• Mailto link with subject and body
• Mailto link with subject, body, bcc and cc
• HTML tags
• More info
• Conclusion

What is a mailto link?

Mailto link is a hyperlink that allows users to send an email to a specific address directly from an HTML document, without having to copy and enter it into an email client like Gmail or Outlook.

First, we will look at the “link part” of the mailto link and then put it inside HTML tags.

Start with mailto:

Every mailto link starts with:

mailto:

Single recipient

Then comes the email address without any additional characters, just the email address as is.

mailto:somebody@email.com

Multiple recipients

It is not advisable to have multiple recipients in the “To”, “Cc” or “Bcc” fields of the mailto link. You can do it, but it may not work.

If you have already decided to create a mailto link with multiple recipients and cannot be discouraged, this is how to go about it:

1. Add multiple email addresses.
2. Separate them with commas (,).
3. Remove spaces between commas and email addresses.
4. Test the link with multiple email clients.

   If commas do not work...

5. Separate email addresses with semicolons (;).
6. Remove spaces between semi-colons and email addresses.
7. Test the link with multiple email clients.

Mailto link with multiple recipients and commas should look like this:

mailto:first@email.com,second@email.com,third@email.com

Or with semicolons:

mailto:first@email.com;second@email.com;third@email.com

The only way that will surely work is with up to 3 email addresses where you include one in the “To” field, one in the “Cc” field and one in the “Bcc” field.

mailto:first@email.com?cc=second@email.com&bcc=third@email.com

No recipient

It is similarly not advisable to leave the “To” field of the mailto link empty. You can do it, but it may not work.

If you have already decided to create a mailto link without recipients, these are potential ways of doing it. Examples below contain “Hello” in the “Body” field of the mailto link.

Vanilla version:

mailto:?body=Hello

Space version:

mailto: ?body=Hello

Space as Unicode version:

mailto:%20?body=Hello

Separate “To” parameter:

mailto:?to=&body=Hello

Remember to test these links with multiple email clients before publishing them.

Characters that divide parameters

In the last example, you may have noticed two characters dividing the mailto link parameters: question mark (?) and ampersand (&).

The question mark appears only before the first parameter, while the ampersand appears before all others. Here are a few examples with underscores (___) representing the content.

mailto:___

mailto:___?body=___

mailto:___?subject=___&body=___

mailto:___?cc=___&bcc=___&subject=___&body=___

Mailto link with subject

Here is an example of a mailto link with the subject line: “How are you doing?”

mailto:somebody@email.com?subject=How%20are%20you%20doing%3F

Spaces and other special characters

As you can see the example includes some unusual characters. This is because the Mailto link generator encoded all special characters in order to format the link properly.

Here is a short list of characters we are used to translated to UTF-8 encoded characters:

%20  =  space
%21  =  !
%2D  =  -
%2E  =  .
%3A  =  :
%3F  =  ?

This is the biggest reason why tools like Mailto link generator come in handy. No one namely wants to memorize that %20 stands for space.

It is also the reason I suggest you ⭐ bookmark this site so you may find it faster the next time you need to create a mailto link.

Mailto link with subject and body

Here is an example of a mailto link with the subject line: “Dear Lars” and body: “Hope you are doing well. I will see you Tuesday. Love, Sigrit”.

mailto:lars@firesaga.com?subject=Dear%20Lars&body=I%20hope%20you%20are%20doing%20well%20and%20will%20see%20you%20on%20Tuesday.%20Love%2C%20Sigrit

Mailto link with subject, body, bcc and cc

Here is an example of a mailto link with everything:

• To: committee@eurovision.com
• Cc: culture@iceland.gov
• Bcc: sigrit@firesaga.com
• Subject: Entry submission
• Body: Greetings Eurovision committee, I am sending you this year’s submission from Fire Saga of Iceland. Best regards, Lars Erickssong

mailto:committee@eurovision.com?cc=culture@iceland.gov&bcc=sigrit@firesaga.com&subject=Entry%20submission&body=Greetings%20Eurovision%20committee%2C%0AI%20am%20sending%20you%20this%20year%E2%80%99s%20submission%20from%20Fire%20Saga%20of%20Iceland.%0ABest%20regards%2C%0ALars%20Erickssong

(If you haven’t guessed yet, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020) is my favorite movie. ❤️)

HTML tags

Once you have generated the “link part” of the mailto link, all that remains is inserting it into the link HTML tags that look like this:

<a> </a>

The opening tag <a> comes at the beginning, while the closing tag </a> comes at the end. Between them comes link text, which is the only part that will be displayed in the end.

<a>Link text</a>

All that remains is pointing the link to its destination, which is done through the href attribute:

<a href="">Link text</a>

It is in this attribute or rather between the quotation marks that you insert the generated mailto link:

<a href="mailto:somebody@email.com">Say hi</a>

Once this is inserted into an HTML document or whatever medium displays hyperlinks, it produces the following mailto link:

Say hi

More info

If you are interested in exploring mailto links in more depth, you can read the RFC 6068 document. In it, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) defines the format and the technical aspects of mailto links.

Conclusion

I believe you now know everything essential about mailto links. 👩‍🎓 Congratulations! 🎉🥳 I hope you found this guide useful and that you master the art of using these links.