How To Unscramble ‘Email This Post’ Link…

When you click on the ‘Email this post’ link, it opens your email client – Outlook, etc – and inserts a line of scrambled code into the ‘To’ field.

I dont see any scrambled code in the To: field, it’s blank for me, just as it should be.

As for the latter 1/2 of your question.. your link is a mailto:// link. By design, mailto:// links are opened with the user’s choice of mail client.

Whooami,

If you click on the ‘Email this post’ link, the following line of text appears in the ‘To’ field:

?subject=your internet marketing challenges&body=http%3a%2f%2fyounginfopreneurs.com%2fhome%2f2006%2f07%2f09%2fyour-internet-marketing-challenges%2f

That means nothing, surely?

It should take the person to a page where they fill-in their details, etc.

What’s going wrong? How do I correct it?

Thanks!

Scotty

99nunkey,

Im going to say this again.

When I click on the email this post link, I do not see any scrambled text anywhere . I see the URL of the post in the body of the e-mail. Nothing else, nothing more. That is NOT to say that you do not see it, thats to say, I do not.

Second,

1. Use your mouse.
2. However over the link.
3. Observe what you see as the url:
mailto:?subject=Your Internet Marketing Challenges&body=http%3A%2F%2Fyounginfopreneurs.com%2Fhome%2F2006%2F07%2F09%2Fyour-internet-marketing-challenges%2F

—

Obviously, if you see gibberish, its the result of the whats in the link. That said, its STILL a mailto link so its going to open up in a mail client — thats WHAT mailto links do.

This is not a standard WP feature, so if you need help I reccommend asking whomever coded the plugin you are using., or waiting until someone else with the same experience comes along.

whooami,

Thanks for looking, here.

I know that mailto: links open up your email link.

But, for some reason, when I click the link my end and it brings up my email client (that’s fine), there is nothing in the body. And when I actually send the email, and then open it, there’s no body in the email. I think the code’s messed-up.

Anyone else see the same thing as me?

Scotty

Are you using an email client that follows internet standards?

Hey Yosemite,

Yeah, I use Horde, and also Outlook, but I get the same thing with both.

It’s weird.

Horde is web-based, isn’t it? No auto-open, no response to mailto: links?

Outlook does not follow internet standards.

EDIT: I’m including an example of mailto inside a link, HIH:
<a href="mailto:[email protected]? [email protected]&[email protected] &subject=Shipping%20Information%20Request&body=Please%20tell%20me%20if%20my%20order%20has%20shipped!">Shipping Request</a>

Thanks for your help there, guys.

The problem must be with the Semiologic theme I’m using, then.

Other blogs I go to that utilize the ‘Email this article/post’ function – at the bottom of every post. This takes you to a page where you fill in your name, email, hit send, etc and then you are emailed that post, as you know.

With this Semiologic theme, it’s obviously opening your email client to email you with the link to the post in the body. I wouldn’t mind this, but the link just doesn’t seem to work.

Oh well.

Hopefully someone using the Semiologic theme has found the same thing and can reply to this…

What you describe is available as a plugin from https://www.lesterchan.net (gamerz) and is available from here https://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/wp-email

It does not open your email client but takes you to a send form page.

It works really well on my site.

adding an ’email this’ form is _not_ what you want to do. it allows spammers to send viagra links using your servers. it’ll get your smtp server blacklisted in no time.

the theme’s email link opens the email client, and fills the relevant fields accordingly. this is the expected behavior. it works fine as far as I can tell. if it doesn’t work with your specific email client, please take the time to identify the mailto: link that does, and send it to me so I can investigate further.

Denis – thanks for that info, I am going investigate if there are precautions I can take to minimise that.

The reason I thought it was OK was because most major newspapers include this type of feature – do you know how they avoid the “viagra” syndrome?

Also I thought that using a mailto: link made it easy for spammers to harvest your email address?

for what it’s worth, they can cover their backs with legal disclaimers (i.e. “you may not send child porn links with our send by email feature”).

they can also add all sorts of content filters, tools to avoid that people send unrelated comments alongside the link to the article, tools to avoid that the same IP sends the same article too many times, etc.

the easiest way to procede is likely to disable the comments box, and to only allow to send the article with a prewritten comment to the recipient of your choice.

In practice, I found it immensely easier to simply stick a mailto link. This further allows to deliver the email to users who are using ISPs such as AOL who delete emails sent by php on sight.

mailto: is spam bait only if you fill the email address. if a spammer is dumb enough to harvest ?subject=yada&body=https://blahblah.com/yada as an email address, I’ll be the last to complain about it.

I’m all set now – thanks!