Chebucto Community Net:
IP FAQs: Mailto Links and the CCN Mail Form
[Mailto Links]
[CCN Mail Form]
Mailto is a way which you can harness the email facility of the Internet
from within the World Wide Web. It is used as part of an HTML anchor
element to create a link to send an email message to a particular email
address. Thus:
<A
HREF="mailto:fake-address@chebucto.ns.ca">fake-address@chebucto.ns.ca</A>
Would send a an email message to fake-address@chebucto.ns.ca. In Lynx
you will see a dialogue box of the form:
You are now sending a comment to:
fake-address@chebucto.ns.ca
Use Ctrl-G to cancel if you do not want to send a message
Please enter a subject line.
Use Control-U to erase the default.
Subject:
Employing this link takes you out of the WWW browser you are using and
into whatever email program is configured to work with it. Thus if you are
using Lynx you are taken into PICO, the online text editor, where you can
compose a message.
When you exit the text editor you follow the dialogue boxes to send the
message to the party specified in the mailto link. If you are using
Netscape to browse the WWW, selecting this link will bring into play
Netscape's own email facility (or Eudora, etc.).
The CCN Mail Form cgi-bin script can be used as an alternative to this
HTML functionality. It allows you to exercise a little more control in the
format of an EMail message.
Its address is:
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/cgi-bin/mf3?
And to use it you would employ a URL such as:
<A
HREF="http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/cgi-bin/mf3?TO=JOHN%20DOE%20%3cfake-address%40chebucto.ns.ca%3e&SUBJECT=Comments%20from%20Some%20Page">Comments
To John Doe </A>
This will call up the mail form:
Preparing a Message to JOHN DOE <fake-address@chebucto.ns.ca>
Your email address or phone number is essential for a response.
Email address: userid@chebucto.ns.ca
Phone number: ___________________________
Name: ___________________________________
Subject of your message: Comments from Some Page_____________
Message (press RETURN for each line):
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________
Select to send your message to JOHN DOE
<fake-address@chebucto.ns.ca>
The seemingly cryptic charcters in this URL are HTML character references
in hexadecimal code. The most frequent ones that you need to employ here
are:
- %20 = bar space
- %3c = <
- %3e = >
- %40 = @
Other character codes can be found in standard HTML references.
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