MAILTO Form Processing

A MAILTO form transmits form data via e-mail. When a MAILTO form is submitted from a Web page, the information placed in the form is e-mailed to a specific Internet address as a message containing name/value pairs. In order for MAILTO forms to work correctly, the browser must be properly configured to send e-mail. Below is an example of a MAILTO form and the mail message it generates.

Notice that browsers encode the form data using special characters. Spaces are replaced with the plus sign ( +), name/value pairs are separated with an ampersand (&), and special characters, such as an exclamation point (!), are replaced with %xx, where xx is the hex Latin-1 character code.