Mailto Links

How to add subject/body to a mailto email link

Emma Dixon avatar
Written by Emma Dixon
Updated over a week ago

A standard mailto: link looks like this:

Pretty simple. When you click that link, it opens up the user’s default mail program, and will populate [email protected] in the TO field.

mailto: link with subject line

mailto:[email protected]?subject=this%20is%20a%20subject

This would send an email to [email protected] with the subject line of “this is a subject”

mailto: link CC & BCC fields

NOTE: As soon as you add a 2nd parameter (“subject” was our first parameter, now we’re adding “cc” and “bcc”), you need to separate all your parameters with an ampersand (&). You begin your parameters, after the mailto:[email protected], with a question mark (?), but use ampersands (&) to separate parameters after that.

Adding CC & BCC fields is as simple as adding a subject.

mailto:[email protected]?subject=this%20is%20a%20subject&[email protected]&[email protected]

Adding multiple emails for these fields would look like this:

mailto: adding body content

Adding a message in the email body. Again, it’s just as easy as before, but be careful of your character encodings. We are using the body parameter. Here’s an example of a mailto: link with subject, body, cc & bcc fields.

mailto:[email protected]?subject=this%20is%20a%20subject&[email protected],[email protected]&[email protected]&body=this%20is%20a%20piece%20of%20body%20copy

Common character encodings

  • space = %20

  • line break / carriage return = %0D%0A

  • question mark = %3F

  • forward slash = %2F

  • colon = %3A


If you would like any assistance with this please don't hesitate to contact your Account Manager!

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