Mailto Link does not work in Hotmail

Question

So, I have an html letter that I create for my company for an email campaign, which we are going to send in the near future for the organization we represent. It contains 2 main links, one to send an email to a person in the organization we represent, and one to go to the landing page on the organization’s website. The landing page link works fine, the mailto: link does not happen when email is viewed with Hotmail. It works with clients other than Hotmail, including Gmail and Outlook.

This is not because the computer on which I am testing does not have an email client installed. It has Outlook 2010 installed and registered as a mailto application. When mailto links are clicked on other sites (not hotmail), they work fine ... outlook launches a new message box, as it should, and fills in the subject and email. When we went to the test in Hotmail, it shows the mailto link in the status bar, but when you click this link, no action occurs. It is as if the link was not a link at all.

This is the link we are trying to use: (a little edited for privacy)

<div class="button"><a href="mailto: [e-mail] ?subject=Resident Requesting More Info">Email a Resident Advisor</a></div> 

This fits in the html table cell. It uses basic CSS styling (everything is embedded in the html address itself). The button class is intended only to highlight the link in the letter ... give it a red frame and a bold link.

To be more clear:

Works:

Gmail - IE9, Chrome, Firefox

Outlook - worked.

Does not work:

Hotmail - all browsers tried

The email was sent using the CampaignMonitor preview function (processed by our QA guy, I don’t have access to it, because I'm pretty new to the company).

I just need to figure out a way to make this work. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Two other programmers and I spent 2 days on this problem earlier this week. I do not have the relevant links, but the long and short story is that this is a known problem and is currently not resolved.

mailto: links under no circumstances work, work in Hotmail, they are deleted or something like that.

In the end, we ended up adding the recipients who assign the copy to be sent by email [e-mail] instead of clicking the link.

Answer 2

Here is a possible solution that I found at http://windowsxp.mvps.org/hmposturl.htm , which I modified for my purposes. This would require sending a unique custom link ad only to your Hotmail recipients, but it seems to work for me. Here's the href line I used:

http://www.hotmail.msn.com/secure/start?action=compose& to=[e-mail] & subject = My Subject Line & body = Body of the letter

Answer 3

This is a common problem for most email-based systems. mailto: does not call them. Google mailto hotmail and you will find answers for Windows and for specific browsers. I think this will set you up

http://email.about.com/od/windowslivehotmailtips/qt/How_to_Make_Windows_Live_Hotmail_Your_Default_Email_Program.htm

Answer 4

Just add target = '_ blank' ... use the tag 'a' html as ...

 <a href='mailto:Your MAILTO ID' target='_blank'>SOME Support</a> 

This works in the hotmail client, but it launches a new instance of the browser additionally.

Answer 5

A known problem, I can confirm, does not work only in Hotmail, the rest works fine, we had the same problem, and we refuse to try.

If you really want the only way is to use JavaScript, onClick change the location of the window, but this introduces a new dependency: JavaScript.