Invoke / click a mailto link with JQuery / JavaScript

I'd like to invoke a mailto link from JavaScript - that is I'd like a method that allows me to open the email client on the users PC, exactly as if they had clicked on a normal mailto link.

How can I do this?

You can use window.location.href here, like this:

window.location.href = "mailto:[email protected]";

You can avoid the blank page issue discussed above by instead using .click() with a link on the page:

document.getElementById('mymailto').click();
...
<a href="mailto:...." id="mymailto" style="display:none"></a>

the working answer for me, tested in chrome, IE and firefox together with outlook was this

window.location.href = 'mailto:[email protected]?subject=Hello there&body=This is the body';

%0d%0a is the new line symbol of the email body in a mailto link

%20 is the space symbol that should be used, but it worked for me as well with normal space

Better to use

window.open('mailto:[email protected]?subject=sub&body=this is body')

If we use window.location.href chrome browser is having error in network tab with Provisional headers are shown Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1

Actually, there is a possibillity to avoid the empty page.

I found out, you can simply insert an iframe with the mailto link into the dom. This works on current Firefox/Chrome and IE (also IE will display a short confirm dialog).

Using jQuery, I got this:

var initMailtoButton = function()
{
    var iframe = $('<iframe id="mailtoFrame" src="mailto:[email protected]" width="1" height="1" border="0" frameborder="0"></iframe>');
    var button = $('#mailtoMessageSend');    
    if (button.length > 0) {            
        button.click(function(){
            // create the iframe
            $('body').append(iframe);
            //remove the iframe, we don't need it any more
            window.setTimeout(function(){
                iframe.remove();    
            }, 500);
            
        });
    }
}

This is an old question, but I combined several Stack Overflows to come up with this function:

//this.MailTo is an array of Email addresses
//this.MailSubject is a free text (unsafe) Subject text input
//this.MailBody is a free text (unsafe) Body input (textarea)
//SpawnMail will URL encode /n, ", and ', append an anchor element with the mailto, and click it to spawn the mail in the users default mail program
SpawnMail: function(){
	$("#MyMailTo").remove();
	var MailList="";
	for(i in this.MailTo)
		MailList+=this.MailTo[i]+";";
	var NewSubject=this.MailSubject.replace(/\n/g, "%0d%0a");
	NewSubject=NewSubject.replace(/"/g, "%22");
	NewSubject=NewSubject.replace(/'/g, "%27");
	var NewBody=this.MailBody.replace(/\n/g, "%0d%0a");
	NewBody=NewBody.replace(/"/g, "%22");
	NewBody=NewBody.replace(/'/g, "%27");
	$("#mainNavBar").after("<a id='MyMailTo' style='display:none;' href='mailto:"+MailList+"?subject="+NewSubject+"&body="+NewBody+"'>&nbsp;</a>");
	document.getElementById('MyMailTo').click();
}

The cool part about this (and how I plan to use it) is I can put this in a loop and split out individual messages to everyone in the array or keep everyone together (which is what this function currently does). Anyway thanks for the tip @Toskan

FOLLOW-UP - Please note the new HTML5 standard does not allow looping mailto (or other pop-up related js) without a "required user gesture". Cool article here: https://github.com/WICG/interventions/issues/12 So you can't use this to mass generate individual e-mails, but it does work well with sending to many in it's current design.