At 2/1/2010 08:29 PM, Marvin Hunkin wrote:
what is the correct code for the subject line to appear in e-mail.


Marvin, here is a link to a summary of mailto syntax:
http://www.ianr.unl.edu/internet/mailto.html

For much more detail, here is a link to RFC 2368 "The mailto URL scheme" written in 1998:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2368

As you may know, there are problems using mailto links on a website, one of which is that spam spiders look for them in order to harvest email addresses. There are ways to obfuscate or conceal an email address in a mailto link but many methods are inaccessible or require JavaScript to be running or both. One very low-tech but possibly effective method is to verbalize the email address, such as "chris at example dot com" with "at" and "dot" spelled out. In order to fool the spam bots, you need to conceal both the email address displayed for the visitor and the address within the HTML href attribute.

Another problem with using mailto is that it assumes that the website visitor's browser can find an email client on their computer. Best practices urge us not to make assumptions about software installed on users' computers. Many people do not use an email client resident on their computer but instead use an online service such as gmail. Mailto will also fail or cause problems if the visitor is using a public computer at a library or internet cafe.

One of the most common solutions is instead use a contact form that posts information to a server-side script which can validate the input, check for obvious spam, and if satisfied generate an email message containing the form input. There are many free contact form scripts kicking around the net in a variety of scripting languages to suit your server.

Regards,

Paul
__________________________

Paul Novitski
Juniper Webcraft Ltd.
http://juniperwebcraft.com


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