Synook

mail(), not mailto:

The mailto: pseudo-protocol seems to be a very popular method of mailing form data. May I point out it is not very efficient? The main problem is that the user is forced to open up their email client just to send the mail. Also, the format isn’t very good, and the to address is revealed.

Instead, you can use a simple server-side command in your preferred server-side language to send mail smoothly, and silently. The client doesn’t even know the data they submitted is being mailed, unless you tell them. You can even format the data any way you like, plain-text or HTML, and send it to anyone you want. Sound better than mailto:?

The PHP function is mail(). It takes three to five arguments – the to address, the subject, the message body, and optional headers (such as content-type), and optional parameters for the mailer program. If you want to send HTML mail, just set the content-type (and MIME) headers, Windows newline delimited.