Fun things you can do with email hyperlinks

By | April 12, 2011

Did you know that email links are specialized hyperlinks? Instead of starting with http:// they start with mailto: . We don’t know how useful you’ll find this tip but if nothing else you can amaze your friends.

Click here to mail Mr. Elephant

Go ahead, click that link, it won’t bite – just don’t press send because there is no such email address. Do you see how the “To”, “CC”, “Subject” and “Body” are all filled in for you when you click that link? It’s easy to do and here’s how you do it:

<a href=”mailto:mrelephant@thisisnotarealemailaddress.com?subject=Water For Elephants&cc=somebodyone@thiscantbereal.com&bcc=nobody@youremailaddress.com&body=Wow! You sure have a big nose! I’m glad my nose is not that big. When will he you be coming to my town? I need to buy some peanuts, for sure!”>Click here to mail Mr. Elephant</a>

<a href=”mailto:mrelephant@thisisnotarealemailaddress.com  (who the mail is being sent to)

? = the separator

subject=Water For Elephants

&=and

cc=insert the email address of the person you want to copy here.

&=and

bcc=insert the email address of whomever you want to send a “blind carbon copy” to here.

&and

body=the text you want to appear in the body of the email.

” You must end the string with a ”  and a bracket like this  > .

Then the text of what you want the link to say, for instance: Click here to mail Mr. Elephant

And then the final end tag </a> which means the end of the link.

Now all that probably makes no sense to many of you, but some of you will get a kick out of playing around with it. The easiest way to learn is to copy the code above (in green) and paste it somewhere and start changing email addresses to real ones. You can leave out any one of the items (Subject, CC, BCC, or Body) if you want. Have fun.

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