Tutorials - HTML - E-mail

Using "mailto:" as a prefix in the href attribute of an <a> tag, you can ask the user to send e-mails to a particular address by clicking on the link.

<a href="mailto:test@example.com">Email Me</a>

You can even specify the subject line and body text for the e-mail, though the user can change these before they send the message:

<a href="mailto:test@example.com?subject=Subject&body=Body Text">Email Me</a>

Should I Use This?

While it's good to get feedback from your users, and providing your email address is a good way of doing this, using mailto: can be a bad idea. Because it uses the default mail handler on your Operating System, it cannot open webmail like Hotmail or GMail, which most people use. It also makes it quite easy for people to collect your email address to spam you. We would recommend using a contact form instead (we'll show you a simple example later), because that way anyone can get in touch, and your email address will not be collected by spammers.

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