[thelist] Sending an Entire Web Page Via Email?

[Simon Willison]

Hi Anthony,

Thursday, August 14, 2003, 7:46:23 PM, you wrote:
> I use Mojo as well, but what I'm looking for here is an app
> that will allow the USER to choose to send a page via email
> to a friend, rather than the administrator (me) doing so.

It can't be done, for the same reason that <form action="mailto:">
doesn't work and even the humble mailto: link frequently fails to
work. For some kind of client side mechanism to work in the way you
describe, it would have to be a) set up on the user's machine and b)
integrated with their browser. Even if you discount the fact that many
people these days use webmail rather than a desktop mail client, you
have to take in to account the dozens of different combinations of
browser, mail application and operating system. And apart from that,
there simply isn't a mechanism for pre-populating an email in an email
application with a bunch of HTML straight from the browser, even if
the browser / mail client are IE and Outlook Express. It's never been
specified, and it probably counts a security risk so it is unlikely to
become possible in the future.

If you want to send a page to someone as an HTML email, you'll have to
use some kind of server side (or externally hosted) solution.

Oh, and HTML emails suck ;)

Cheers,

Simon
-- 
http://simon.incutio.com/