mailto links revisited

I’ve never talked about them before, but have recently found a fix for a problem that has plagued us for a while.

<a href="mailto:abuse@elfden.co.uk?subject=abusive spam">email abuse</a>

This is a simple mailto: link which adds the subject into the email, try it out: test email. This always worked fine for OE but was always problematical in other email clients like Pegasus.

The problem was highlighted recently when running a version of tidybot, a HTML checker on The L-Space Web. Several malformed URI references were being shown as possible errors.

The solution was incredibly simple, but appears to have been missed by some of the sites that mention how to add a subject to the mailto link.

Don’t use spaces in the Subject! So the code above becomes:

<a href="mailto:abuse@elfden.co.uk?subject=abusive-spam">email abuse</a>

In theory using %20, which is transposed to a ‘space’, instead of a ‘-‘ would be possible, but that makes the source code messy in my opinion.