Email Tricks

Have you ever seen an email link that causes an email open with the Subject line already filled in? Have you wondered how that was done? Me too.

Oh wait . . . I do know how to do that, and you will too if you keep reading.

<a href="mailto:dork@dorky.com?subject=I'm a Geek">Email Me</a>

It's your basic mail link with ?subject=whatever added to the end of your email address.

Well now, that's pretty easy, isn't it? You'd better agree or I'll plant crabgrass in your front yard.

If you emailed someone from a link on a page like the example shown above, the user's email would probably pop open with "I'm a Geek" in the subject line, and I reckon they'd just have to take your word for it. I say probably because not all email clients support it, but the most popular ones do.

You can change the word "subject" in the code to "body" and have a short message automatically placed into the body of the email. I'm not sure why you'd want people to send you a message you wrote yourself, but hey, who am I to judge?

You can also specify the subject and the body of the message at the same time. I don't know why you'd want to do that either, but it can be done and may go like this:

<a href="mailto:ratboy@thedump.com?subject=Rats&body=need love too">Email</a>

Sorry about the tiny type, but that code must be on one line and that's the only way it would fit in space available. Anyway, that code would open an email with "Rats" in the subject line and "need love too" in the message body. But wait! We're not finished with email tricks yet! You can also have an email sent to multiple recipients.

<a href="mailto:me@here.net?cc=you@there.com&bcc=joe@wherever.net">E-Mail</a>

In that example, one copy of the email would go to "me" and one copy would go to "you" and a blind carbon copy would be sent to "Joe" ...I didn't want to leave good ol' Joe out, he's been feeling kind of lonely lately.

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