404 errors from mailto links

Mailto links truncated

[starhugger]

This seemed to be a similar problem to this thread, about truncated URL referrals:

[webmasterworld.com...]

...but I'm not so sure it's the same problem, now that I think about it, so I'm posting this here.

I'm starting to see truncated requests in my 404 stats for some of my mailto links. The recent ones seem to be connected to my home page, but I haven't changed any of my mailto links on that page for months and months.

The weird thing is that the "mailto: address" seems to be complete as an address and so it should go through; yet it shows up in my 404s.

For example: say I have a link mailto: [e-mail]?subject=Send more info In the 404 list, it shows mailto: [e-mail] and it's just the ?subject=Send more info that's missing. So the important part seems to be intact and seems like it should go through, but it's registering as a 404. When I do a test send by clicking on these links on the live site, I have no problem getting an email window from Outlook (my default email).

This is happening with various email addresses I use on the page. Each of these email account names is a different length of characters (e.g., "webmaster" "maillist"). Since the truncation problem discussed in the above thread has a pattern of cutting off after a certain number of characters, it might not be caused by the same problem (or even related to it). Hence, I'm posting this as a separate thread.

I just started seeing these last month. In May, the errors are all truncated before the ".com" and there's an ampersand inserted at the end: mailto: me@mysite&. There is no referring URL given. In June, I started getting the complete email addresses that are missing the subject lines. These ones show my home page as the referring URL.

Anyone else seeing this pattern? Any ideas what's causing this? A rogue bot? Some update to a browser that suddenly doesn't like mailto links? Thanks for any help with this.

Starhugger

[oxbaker]

i would think that the truncated strings are a result of some character encoding issues on your mailto links. its probably truncating this:

[e-mail] into me@mysite&...

the & you are seeing is probably the server trying to Encode the "." character, which can be represented as "." and the # is generally a marker for a comment block in a log file. So that may be it.

Maybe the page character set for these pages has changed? any globalization changes? You could try urlEncoding the actual mailto string.

something like this:

mailto: [e-mail]&subject=something.

that may work, but definately check the Character set of the page, it may be wrong.

hth,
mcm