How to prompt user to select email client for mailto attribute

Question

I have been looking for this functionality, if is it possible to add an email client selector when the users click on mailto: For example i am using following code for emails

<a href="mailto:[email protected]">Email Us</a>

What if users want to use gmail/yahoo/hotmail instead of his default email client e.g Outlook. I have found a similar question asked before as well. But i need to know if that is in any case possible either with any jQuery plugin or HTML whatever it may be.

You likely could configure something to connect to webmail services using some form of authentication like OAuth but it would get complicated and difficult to support. It's also incredibly un web-like in that it is trying to interfere with a systems ability to control the experience. — Matt Whipple
No, not there I'm aware of. Browsers take the mailto and translate to a system call, which in turn open default e-mail client. If the user want to use a different client, let them switch on their system. — Ortiga
This is handled by the browser and system and out of your control. Thankfully. — chovy

Unknown Unknown · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-29T05:04:32

you can't do this with 'mailto' functionality. But you can acheive targeting email clients with the help of php function. Here is the php function to Targeting Specific Web-based Clients:

    Targeting Specific Web-based Clients

function wcs_mailto_ex($mailto='', $subject='', $body='', $client='', $link_text='', $link_title='', $at_replace='&#64;')
{
// init
$subject = rawurlencode(strip_tags($subject));
$body = str_replace('\r\n', '%0A', $body);
$body = str_replace('\n', '%0A', $body);
if (!$link_text) {$link_text = $mailto;}
$link_text = str_replace('@', $at_replace, $link_text);
$client = strtolower($client);

// default parameters (system mail: Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.)
$email['url'] = 'mailto:' . $mailto . '?subject=' . $subject . '&amp;body=' . $body;
$email['width'] = 0;
$email['height'] = 0;
$email['scrollbars'] = 0;

// constuct client-specific parameters
switch($client)
{
    case 'gmail':
    case 'g mail':
    case 'google mail':
    case 'google':
        $email['url'] = 'https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailto&shva=1&to=' . $mailto . '&amp;su=' . $subject . '&amp;body=' . $body;
        $email['width'] = 700;
        $email['height'] = 500;
        $email['scrollbars'] = 1;
        break;
    case 'hotmail':
    case 'hmail':
    case 'livemail':
    case 'live mail':
        $email['url'] = 'http://mail.live.com/?rru=compose&amp;to=' . $mailto . '&amp;subject=' . $subject . '&amp;body=' . $body;
        $email['width'] = 850;
        $email['height'] = 550;
        $email['scrollbars'] = 1;
        break;
    case 'yahoo mail':
    case 'ymail':
    case 'yahoo':
        $body = str_replace('%0A', '<br>', $body);
        $body = urlencode(urlencode($body));
        $email['url'] = 'http://compose.mail.yahoo.com?to=' . $mailto . '&subject=' . rawurlencode($subject) . '&amp;body=' . $body;
        $email['width'] = 750;
        $email['height'] = 625;
        $email['scrollbars'] = 1;
        break;
}

// prep for popup
$wdw_name = 'wcs_mailto_ex_wdw';
$wdw_features = "scrollbars=$scrollbars,status=0,toolbar=0,location=0,directories=0,menubar=0,resizable=1,width=";
$url = $email['url'];
$width = $email['width'];
$height = $email['height'];
$scrollbars = $email['scrollbars'];

// determine if display should be a popup window
if ($email['width'])
{
    $javascript = "window.open('$url', '$wdw_name', '$wdw_features$width,height=$height');return false;";
    $output = "<a rel='nofollow' style='cursor:pointer;' onclick=\"$javascript\" title='$title'>" . $link_text . "</a>";
}
else
{
    $output = '<a href="' . $url . '" rel="nofollow" title="' . $link_title . '">' . $link_text . '</a>';
}

// exit
echo $output;
}

To target gmail client call the above function as follows:

    wcs_mailto_ex('[email protected]',
            'Test Subject Line',
            'This is a sample\n\nemail for testing.\n\nBest regards,\nme',
            'gmail',
            'gMail Client'
            );

Source: http://wpcodesnippets.info/blog/how-to-target-mailto-email-clients.html

How to prompt user to select email client for mailto attribute

1 Answers