Mailto Link Generator | Create HTML for Email Links

Create the email HTML Code using a "mailto" hyperlink - the HTML email link code that opens someone's email software (like Microsoft Outlook for instance). I will show you how to write the code for this and at the bottom of the page there's a tool to generate the HTML email link.

It's a pretty nifty generator that lets you create the email HTML code for a mailto link with advanced options like having the subject and body text encoded into the email link if you like.

Should You Use Mailto Links?

Mailto links are not deprecated... but if a hundred random people were to encounter a mailto link on a website, it would not work as expected for the vast majority of them.

Clicking on the link would not open up their email client so it's probably best to make that your email address is the link text. This way people can manually copy the email if they want to contact you.

What Not To Include in the HTML Email Code

Make sure not to include a question mark, equal sign, an ampersand or double quotes in your subject line or body as that will break the code. If you do need to include them than they need to be written differently. You can either memorize the following code - ampersand is & - double quotes is " - equal sign is = and question mark is ? or you can use this little tool to generate the email link code in a safely encoded manner (though some email software may require you not to use even the encoded equivalents in the email link).

Generate the Email HTML Link Code
Your Email address:
The Link Text:
The Subject Line:
The Body of the Email:
Copy this Code:

HTML Email Mailto Link

Here's a HTML email link code example. If you want the person to click the mailto hyperlink and their email client to open with your email in the TO part of the email then you need to implement something like the following code.

This pretty much the simplest implementation of an email's HTML link code. To make this work for you simply change the two occurrences of the email address to your own email address.

As a recommendation I would use your email as the link text instead of something like "contact me" or similar which usually suggests to the user that they're going to be sent to a contact form - more so than having their email client open up.

Email HTML Code with Subject

We'll take the previous example and modify it so that now it will have you email in the TO field and have a subject line in the SUBJECT field of the email. The new part has been bolded

If you look at the text above you can see that I've added the ?subject= parameter to the email and that the subject's lines value will be "I love TextFixer.com"

Email HTML Code with Subject and Body

You can even go one step further and add text that will appear in the body of the email. At this point all the person has to do is press send. I think there are very few circumstances where you would need to add the body value but for the sake of completeness here's what the email code would look like.

That's about it. It's pretty simple to create the email HTML code for the email link. You just have to make sure not to break the email mailto string by using letters that should be encoded.

Now that you know everything about HTML email links you should now be able to easily embed email link code into your webpages or HTML newsletters.