Re: RE[2]: mailto URLs

[Prabhat Keni <[e-mail]>]

Mike Braca <[e-mail]> writes:

> Hmmm, I just found out that Netscape is sending the headers through as a
> query, with '?'.  I dislike that also, but not as much as '#'. At least
> '?' has a history of being mangled.

> mailto:[e-mail]?SUBJECT=foo;CC=bar

Following is what Netscape does today.  Its similar in spirit to the
proposal which started this discussion with the following differences:

        o covers more headers.
	o Parses mailbox instead of addr-spec, so one could specify
          full names in addition to bare addresses.
        o Multiple addresses are allowed.
        o There's no mechanism to specify body.  Although, it'd be nice to
          be able to do that.

Quote from an internal email from a colleague:

> The syntax goes something like
> 
>  URL     :=  'mailto:' [ ADDRS ] [ HEADERS ]
>  ADDRS   :=  [ ADDR [ ',' ADDR ]* ]
>  ADDR    :=  <RFC822 address, hex-encoded if necessary>
>  HEADERS :=  '?' HNAME '=' HVALUE [ '&' HNAME '=' HVALUE ]
>  HNAME   :=  <a mail header name; currently we only support those
>               headers which you can edit in a mail composition window,
>               but it would be sensible to allow other headers as well
>               (with an exclusion list of "dangerous" headers.)>
>  HVALUE  :=  <contents of the header, hex-encoded if necessary>
> 
> This allows a URL to initialize the contents of a mail composition 
> window; for example, you could put a URL in a document like
> 
>   <A HREF="mailto:[e-mail]?subject=cool%20page%21&cc=[e-mail]">
> 
> and when the user clicked on it, there would be a default subject
> waiting for them.
> 
> We also support this syntax when using a mailto as the POST address
> of a form submission; but in that case, we allow all headers, even
> unknown ones, to be generated, except for "dangerous" headers.
> These are the headers that form submissions cannot set or override
> the default values of:
> 
> 	Apparently-To
> 	BCC
> 	Content-Encoding
> 	Content-Transfer-Encoding
> 	Content-Type
> 	Date
> 	Distribution
> 	FCC
> 	Followup-To
> 	From
> 	MIME-Version
> 	Message-ID
> 	Newsgroups
> 	Organization
> 	Reply-To
> 	Sender
> 	X-Mozilla-Status
> 	X-UIDL
> 	XRef
> 
> For example, to have a form which sent mail with a different
> subject, and some unknown header, one could do this:
> 
> <FORM METHOD=POST 
>       ENCTYPE=text/plain
>       ACTION="mailto:no-such-address?Subject=neato&X-Random-Header=yow">
> <INPUT TYPE=TEXT NAME=disposition VALUE="hey, cool">
> <INPUT TYPE=submit VALUE="Send Mail">
> </FORM>

-- 
Prabhat Keni.