Mailto Link Generator

A mailto: link is a URL like any other, and it follows the same rules. The scheme is mailto:, the path is the recipient, and everything after the first ? is a query string of fields the mail client should pre-fill. Every field after the first is joined with &, never another ? — that single mistake is behind most hand-written links that “work on my machine” and nowhere else.

The other half of the job is encoding. Spaces become %20, line breaks become %0A, ampersands inside your subject become %26 or they end the field early. Typing an encoded body by hand is possible and miserable; that is what this generator is for.

mailto: is old and widely implemented, which means the basics are safe everywhere and the edges are not. This is the honest support picture.

A mailto: link hands the interaction to whatever the visitor’s device has registered as its mail handler. On a phone, or on a laptop with a desktop client configured, that is a fast, familiar experience — the compose window opens with everything filled in and the person is already writing. It is genuinely better than a form for that audience.

If the visitor reads mail in a browser tab and has never registered a handler, the click does nothing visible at all. There is no error and no fallback; the page simply appears broken. That is why a public contact page usually wants a form, and why a mailto belongs where the audience is known — a developer docs page, an internal tool, a signature, a support article aimed at people already in a mail client.

The second consideration is harvesting. An address in an href is plain text in your HTML, and scrapers have read those for decades — including, to be fair, tools like the email extractor on this site. If the page gets real traffic, publish a role address you can filter rather than a personal one, and treat the obfuscation tricks with suspicion: most of them inconvenience real visitors and screen readers more than they inconvenience a scraper.

The pre-filled support request. Put the page URL, the plan and the browser into the body, and support stops asking three questions before they can start. Fill the body here, then template the dynamic parts server-side.

The one-click intro. A subject and a first line already written removes the hardest part of sending a cold message — starting it. Keep the body to two sentences; a long pre-written message reads as a form letter the recipient is being asked to sign.

The bcc’d paper trail. Bcc your CRM drop-address on links that generate real conversations, and the thread files itself without anyone remembering to forward it.