mailto link multiple body lines

Question

having trouble getting multiple lines to work correctly in a mailto link

In my case I'm testing it with an Outlook default mail reader.

The following is put in an anchor href:

mailto:email@address.com?&subject=test&body=type%20your&body=message%20here

only "message here" shows up in the email body. (whether I use chrome or IE)

thoughts?

score 227 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

227

You can use URL encoding to encode the newline as %0A.

mailto:email@address.com?subject=test&body=type%20your%0Amessage%20here

While the above appears to work in many cases, user olibre points out that the RFC governing the mailto URI scheme specifies that %0D%0A (carriage return + line feed) should be used instead of %0A (line feed). See also: Newline Representations.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:02

Community

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answered Apr 27 '12 at 19:04

cyang

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Thanks, this worked well for me and seems much simpler than other solutions floating around on the internet. – bryn Feb 09 '13 at 09:02
This should work for all special characters, right? &=%26, %=%25, are there any characters where this pattern doesn't hold? – blast_hardcheese Nov 09 '13 at 09:50
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for info, `$0A` is simply `escape( "\n" )` – divillysausages Jun 09 '14 at 14:40
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That encoder uses the standard `encodeURIComponent` to encode the URI components. – Cees Timmerman Jul 01 '14 at 14:04
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%0D%0A Worked for me for email and share in whatsapp message – BenB Jul 07 '16 at 18:52
I've been trying to use this to do a double line break, whenever I use 2 `%0D%0A` together it breaks the hyperlink – Fiztban Jun 20 '18 at 10:40

score 45 · Answer 2 · edited Oct 07 '21 at 07:34

Use a single body parameter within the mailto string
Use %0D%0A as newline

The mailto URI Scheme is specified by by RFC2368 (July 1998) and RFC6068 (October 2010).
Below is an extract of section 5 of this last RFC:

[...] line breaks in the body of a message MUST be encoded with "%0D%0A".
Implementations MAY add a final line break to the body of a message even if there is no trailing "%0D%0A" in the body [...]

See also in section 6 the example from the same RFC:

<mailto:infobot@example.com?body=send%20current-issue%0D%0Asend%20index>

The above mailto body corresponds to:

send current-issue
send index

score 20 · Answer 3 · answered Oct 04 '13 at 11:41

20

To get body lines use escape()

body_line =  escape("\n");

so

href = "mailto:me@my.com?body=hello,"+body_line+"I like this.";

answered Oct 04 '13 at 11:41

lokeshjain2008

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I prefer this personally. Mainly because this also works when you try and add a % – Dan James Palmer Jan 09 '14 at 02:44
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`encodeURIComponent`, rather. [See here.](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/75980/best-practice-escape-or-encodeuri-encodeuricomponent) – Cees Timmerman Jul 01 '14 at 14:01

kiranvj · Answer 4 · 2018-11-13T03:50:08.027

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This is what I do, just add \n and use encodeURIComponent

Example

var emailBody = "1st line.\n 2nd line \n 3rd line";

emailBody = encodeURIComponent(emailBody);

href = "mailto:me@somesite.com?body=" + emailBody;

Check encodeURIComponent docs

edited Nov 13 '18 at 03:50

answered Oct 03 '14 at 16:59

kiranvj

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What `include` do you use for `encodeURIComponent` ? – frakman1 Jul 02 '17 at 23:56
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@frakman1 encodeURIComponent is a JavaScript function. You can use it without any includes. – kiranvj Jul 04 '17 at 05:04
@Koosh bcoz the above code is JavaScript, try this method to encode email body in Blazor https://stackoverflow.com/a/4550600/1188322 – kiranvj Aug 29 '20 at 04:19

mailto link multiple body lines

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