I thought I'd seen it all

Meta Refresh to mailto:

[bobriggs]

Apologies if wrong forum, but this applies more to HTML than scripting.

I went to a classified ad site, there was a link for contact seller. Normally on these sites you'll get a form to fill out. No form, just a hyperlink. Basically, the link was for the same page, with extra parameters preloaded for Subject, domain, and user: so you get a subject, and the user and domain form an email address. - It will become clear that the parameters are to hide email addresses.

So it spit back the same page, with an extra line:
<meta HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="1; URL=mailto:[e-mail]?Subject=The Subject">
And it cranked up my email client! (MSIE and outlook express)

I really don't know what to think. In a way, it is a good protection against email harvesters, but how many browsers would crank up your email client with a meta refresh?

Anybody else used this method?

[tedster]

Never ran into that one before -- it's pretty ingenious as long as the non-standard behavior doesn't freak out the user.

[bobriggs]

I was freaked. It took me a while to figure out how it was being done.

[adding] (because I don't want to reply to my own post)

I wonder what would happen with a server redirect to a mailto:

Location: mailto:[e-mail]?subject=subject

[bird]

A browser acting upon a "mailto" link is supposed to invoke the e-mail software of its choice with the given parameters. Whether that link was triggered by clicking on an anchor on a page, by a meta refresh, by a server redirect, or by you typing it into the address bar yourself doesn't matter at all. The behaviour you have seen is what you should expect from any browser.

I have never used this technique myself, but I know of several people who have done so for quite a while, and I have never heard them report of any compatibility problems.

I actually think that the "freaking" will only happen with people who know too much about the technology involved. The average surfer just expects "something" to happen when he clicks on a link. He probably won't notice a big difference between a normal mailto link and this kind of redirect, and there would be no visible difference at all when using a server side redirect.

[bobriggs]

You're exactly right. I saw the url in my status bar and expected something else. But as far as the server side redirect and the meta refresh:

Opera, Mozilla, and MSIE handle the meta refresh ok on that site.

Here is testmt.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

print "location: mailto:me\@example.com?subject=test\n\n";

Mozilla and MSIE handle a server redirect the same - they crank up the email client, and it's less painful because you don't have to send all the html again, the browser window doesn't clear. But opera 6 gives me this message:

Illegal Address (as an alert type), then
Internal Communication error - same alert type.

All in all, it seems like a pretty good alternative to a mailto: link, I think.

[rewboss]

The compatibility problems have less to do with which version browser/platform etc and more to do with whether or not the browser happens to launch an e-mail client that is correctly configured. More often than not, this is simply not the case.