4.4 mailto

A mailto URL specifies an email message to be sent to a given email address. For example, ‘mailto:foo@bar.com’ specifies sending a message to ‘foo@bar.com’. The “retrieval method” for such URLs is to open a mail composition buffer in which the appropriate content (e.g., the recipient address) has been filled in.

As defined in RFC 6068, a mailto URL can have the form

‘mailto:mailbox[?header=contents[&header=contents]]’

where an arbitrary number of headers can be added. If the header is ‘body’, then contents is put in the message body; otherwise, a header header field is created with contents as its contents. Note that the url library does not perform any checking of header or contents, so you should check them before sending the message.

User Option: url-mail-command

The value of this variable is the function called whenever url needs to send mail. This should normally be left its default, which is the standard mail-composition command compose-mail. See Sending Mail in The GNU Emacs Manual.

If the document containing the mailto URL itself possessed a known URL, Emacs automatically inserts an ‘X-Url-From’ header field into the mail buffer, specifying that URL.