Mailto Links

Electronic Mail | Mailto Links

Mailto Links

There is an extremely simple way to incorporate sending electronic mail into a Web document. One merely has to insert a "mailto" link, which has the general form

where the portion shown in yellow is always the same in any such link, the portion shown in green is the email address to which the message is to be sent ([email protected] in this case), and the portion shown in light blue is the link name that will appear on the browser page (Prez in this case). The link name is completely up to you to choose, but the email address obviously must be the exact address of the person to whom you wish to send email.
Thus, the mailto command in the preceding figure produces the following link when incorporated into an HTML document:

Try clicking on this link and seeing what happens. If your browser is properly configured to send email, this should pop up a mailing window with the address of the President already entered. (Note that the prevalence and convenience of mailto links is a good argument for configuring your browser for email even if you primarily use web mail and rarely or never read mail with your browser's email interface.)
You may either send the President a message, if you have something important to tell him, or you can kill the mail window so that no message is sent by clicking the close button in the upper right hand corner.

Homepage Exercise

It looks like mailto links could be VERY useful, doesn't it? If you wish, you can use this exercise to add a couple of mailto links to your homepage.


			Electronic Mail \| Mailto Links
		Mailto Links There is an extremely simple way to incorporate sending electronic mail into a Web document. One merely has to insert a "mailto" link, which has the general form where the portion shown in yellow is always the same in any such link, the portion shown in green is the email address to which the message is to be sent ([email protected] in this case), and the portion shown in light blue is the link name that will appear on the browser page (Prez in this case). The link name is completely up to you to choose, but the email address obviously must be the exact address of the person to whom you wish to send email. Thus, the mailto command in the preceding figure produces the following link when incorporated into an HTML document: Try clicking on this link and seeing what happens. If your browser is properly configured to send email, this should pop up a mailing window with the address of the President already entered. (Note that the prevalence and convenience of mailto links is a good argument for configuring your browser for email even if you primarily use web mail and rarely or never read mail with your browser's email interface.) You may either send the President a message, if you have something important to tell him, or you can kill the mail window so that no message is sent by clicking the close button in the upper right hand corner. Homepage Exercise It looks like mailto links could be VERY useful, doesn't it? If you wish, you can use this exercise to add a couple of mailto links to your homepage.