Emailing to multiple recipients with html Mailto: not working

Question

we have 400 to 500 hundred emails, when we concatenate them and put them in mailto: it does not work, browser automatically adds \"...\" in between emails and clicking link

Answer 1

Depending on your use case, it might be possible to send an email from the browser like this, but it relies on the user having set up the protocol handler for mailto properly.

For a limited number of users e.g. a few site administrators this could be a good solution. As you can control the set up of the client machine and make sure that it works.

So if you created a page with this link

mailto:me@example.com?bcc=someone_else@example.com

mailto:someone@example.com?subject=This%20is%20the%20subject&bcc=someone_else@example.com&body=This%20is%20the%20body

Cut and paste in to the address bar to test if this will work on your machine.

I wouldn't recommend this as a robust solution for any good software product, you should use a server based solution. But if you need something to help with internal systems, or just for a personal site, then this will take minutes and cause fewer headaches then server based solutions.

There are many many options for sending email, I think this one is simple, quick and flexible, but it will not work on all machines, maybe only 70%???

One last thing, usually if you are sending emails to multiple recipients send it to yourself and use the Blind Carbon Copy field (bcc) This means that your not sharing your customers' email addresses with all of your other customers.

tl;dr

To summarise, if you can test/troubleshoot every single client machine that will use the email link, then consider using a complicated mailto link. Otherwise go for a server side email.

And use the Bcc field for mass emails.