Link to mail server from website

Question

I have an email page on my website with a form and tinyMCE and all that fancy stuff, but I also want to add a couple of links to the popular mail servers such as gmail, yahoo, and hotmail.

I've seen some links that go to the my Microsoft Office Outlook (which I never use), and I've also seen a gmail link that opens up gmail in a new tab with a form already open and a mailto: value already given. Just wondering how this is done if I, lets say, have a mailto: value to send and perhaps a subject and message.

Just to make it clear, I want three or four image links on my page, each one for a different mail server (gmail, yahoo...) and when clicked on, it opens a form partly filled out (a mailto:value and possibly a subject and/or message) fullscreen. Thanks.

Answer 1

It's not going to be easy, as you'll have to integrate with each one of these services. How about going at it a different way? For GMail (at least on Chrome) you can figure the web app as the handler for your mailto: links. With that, you can create a link that opens GMail, optionally with subject and body filled in. See RFC2368 for details, or try this link.

Most users don't have accounts on all of the web mail services you mentioned anyways, and using the mailto link allow the mail to the sent using the user's default e-mail client (may it be Outlook, or GMail) which most people prefer anyways.