[thelist] mailto: long body text (ANSWERED)

Tyme nopun at bellsouth.net
Tue Aug 14 18:18:14 CDT 2001


Tyme,
Hmmm.  What a puzzling question.  I'm curious too.  While my initial search
for "mailto: length" did not produce an answer, I revisited my same Google
search results, trying a link that gave me a 404 error the night before.
And, what do you know...an answer.  Here is what I found:

"Several users have noted that clicking on a mailto link with too many
addresses causes the following error message to appear:

    'Could not perform this operation because the default mail client is not
properly installed.'

This error message appears even though OE is set to be your default mail
client under Tools | Options | General and you experience no other problems
in using OE.

Although the number of addresses seems to vary, what is going on here is
that OE's ability to handle mailto links has an implicit character limit of
456 characters. You can prove this for yourself by building up a mailto link
using abc00 at isp.com, abc01 at isp.com, etc., and then opening the HTM file with
the mailto link in it.  Using the format listed above, the character
limitation translates into 32 email addresses.  The actual number of email
addresses that the fields can hold obviously will vary depending on the
length of the addresses included -- the addresses generally are shorter than
abc00 at isp.com, you'll be able to add more than 32 addresses to an address
field and vice-versa."

It is reasonable to assume that this limit holds for the other fields as
well.  (Never took my testing far enough to widdle down what the failure
length was.)

Tyme


----- Original Message -----
From: Tyme <nopun at bellsouth.net>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 14, 2001 11:48 AM
Subject: [thelist] mailto: long body text


> Have a long letter (see http://www.oceanforestlakes.com/vpc.asp "Sample
> Letter") that I want to insert as a mailto: body value.  Cannot seem to
get
> it to work.  [In IE5.01, I'm getting an error 'default mail client not
> properly configured'.  Not so, as it works with a smaller block of text.]
>
> I've tried encoding it (Server.HTMLEncode; Server.URLEncode; manually
> encoding it -- spaces et al.);
>
> Tried breaking it up into smaller variables and the stringing those
> variables;
>
> Running it all together as one string (for testing);
>
> Etc.!
>
> The problem seems to be the size, as it does work with only 1 paragraph.
> However, I did a search for "mailto:" and could not find any information
on
> maximum length.
>
> Anyone got any ideas here?  I might have better luck with ASPMail or such,
> but actually prefer to use the mailto: in this case.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Tyme







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