Email a friend

**Riftvalley** · 24 November 2010, 01:07 PM

Hi, I have been asked to put an "email a friend" button onto a website.

I tried putting the following in the html placeholder and it is OK, just, but I would prefer have spaces and paragraphs in the pop-up email.

^a title="Send this webpage to a friend" href="mailto:?subject=Web Site for Villa Aphrodite &body=This is a link to the new website for the Villa Aphrodite in Crete : http://www.aphroditevillacrete.com"^Email to a Friend^/a^
Please use this link to send an email to a friend telling them about the Villa Aphrodite.

I changed the < and > to a ^ in case html is not allowed in the forum.

I tried putting html after the &body= but it just came straight through into the email message.

Is it possible to create a simple more friendly Email a friend message just with html
(just to introduce some paragraphs would be sufficient.

Many thanks

Martin

**zaphodeist** · 24 November 2010, 01:38 PM

You could try playing with this format - the %0a is a line break 9and the [at] is an @ of course)

anybody[at]here.com subject:For your attention body:Please fill in this form%0a%0aNAME%0a%0aPHONE%0a%0aADDRESS%0a%0aMESSAG E

**gwpriester** · 24 November 2010, 07:22 PM

OK This will work fine:

mailto:yourname@yourISP.com?subject=Web Site for Villa Aphrodite &body=This is a link to the new website for the Villa Aphrodite in Crete : http://www.aphroditevillacrete.com

Replace yourname@yourISP.com with your actual e-mail address, or the sender's e-mail address.

Add this text to the Link > Link to Web or e-mail Address a button with the appropriate text on the button.

You can see this work in the attached file.

**zaphodeist** · 24 November 2010, 08:26 PM

The syntax for expanding the link can be found here - but the anchors ( <a href= ) and quotes aren't necessary when using the mailto: protocol in xara's Link To Web or Email address

**gwpriester** · 24 November 2010, 09:41 PM

Is there a problem with what I posted John? Seems to work for me.

**zaphodeist** · 24 November 2010, 09:46 PM

No, not at all. I just thought I'd post the extra syntax for line breaks etc as Riftvalley wanted paragraphs and the info might be of use to others

**gwpriester** · 25 November 2010, 01:12 AM

**Riftvalley** · 26 November 2010, 10:51 AM

Many thanks Gary and John,

Very useful, I put the text into the link box rather than the html place-holder box and it works fine.

In particular the %0A inserted for lines is very useful in setting out the message.

There seems to be a limitation of 177 characters (approx) so the message has to be short.

I will experiment with using %0A in the html place-holder box to see if the size limitation still holds.

Generally I use a captcha with all my forms etc., I am not sure how vulnerable this way is for attracting spam, presumably as it does not contain a return email address should be OK.

Kind regards

Martin

**zaphodeist** · 26 November 2010, 11:09 AM

Straight email links in the 'Link to' box are encoded so as long as your visible text is something like 'contact' rather than the address itself you would be ok. Test this by previewing a page and viewing the source code.

The limitation is a bit of a pain ... not much more than a Tweet!

**Riftvalley** · 26 November 2010, 01:18 PM

A tiny point, but because I had some text on the pop-up layer the mouse pointer was not a hand symbol when hovered over the text. As I did not want the text to become blue underlined (web default setting) I added the link to a transparent rectangle in the pop-up layer. As an alternative I did think of making the pop-up button and text into a .jpg but I think the transparent layer is the best.