Mailto link generator for support contact links

How to make a mailto link

1. Pick a starting point. Contact support, Report a problem, Billing question or Order help. Each one fills in a subject and a short body with prompts for the details your team needs.
2. Enter your support address. Add cc or bcc addresses if you want, and edit the subject, the body and the link text. Addresses that are not valid are left out of the link and listed under the result.
3. Copy the format you need. The bare link for a button field in your CMS, the HTML anchor for a page or email template, or the Markdown link for docs. Select the test link to see what your customers get.

What is in a mailto link

A mailto link is a web address that opens a new email instead of a page. The standard (RFC 6068) puts the recipients after mailto: and the other fields after a question mark, joined with &:

mailto:help@example.com?cc=lead@example.com&subject=Support%20request&body=What%20happened%3A

Why encoding matters

A link cannot hold spaces, line breaks or some symbols as they are. Each one must be written as a percent sign and its character code. If it is not, the link breaks in ways that are easy to miss:

• A # in the subject, as in "Help with order #", ends the link there, because browsers read # as the start of a page section. The rest of the subject and the whole body are lost.
• An & in the body, as in "Refund & return", starts a new field, so the body stops there.
• A + stays a plus sign in a mailto link. Some tools encode a space as +, which mail apps then show as a plus sign.

The generator encodes every value. For example, a subject and a two-line body become:

mailto:help@example.com?subject=Help%20with%20order%20%23&body=Order%20number%3A%0D%0AWhat%20went%20wrong%3A

Spaces are %20, the # is %23, the colon is %3A and the line break is %0D%0A, the carriage return and line feed the standard asks for. The characters ! ' ( ) * are encoded too, because some mail apps read them wrong.

The HTML and Markdown snippets

In HTML, the & between fields must be written as & inside the href attribute. Browsers forgive a bare & most of the time, but validators and some email builders do not. The HTML snippet does this for you:

<a href="mailto:help@example.com?subject=Support%20request&amp;body=Hi%2C">Contact support</a>

The Markdown snippet is a normal Markdown link with the mailto: address. It works in GitHub, documentation sites and most help center editors that accept Markdown.

Good support contact links

• Use a shared address. A support address that goes to a help desk or a shared inbox, not a person. People leave; the address should not.
• Prefill the subject. A subject such as "Billing question" lets your team sort and route the email before they open it.
• Ask for what you need in the body. An order number, the account email, the steps that led to a problem. Three or four short prompts work better than a form letter, and customers can delete what does not apply.
• Show the address too. Not every visitor has a mail app set up. Put the address in plain text next to the link so it can be copied into webmail.
• Keep it short. Some mail apps and browsers cut links at about 2,000 characters. The generator warns you when your link is longer.

What a mailto link cannot do

A mailto link cannot attach files, format the body or send the email: the customer still reviews and sends it from their own mail app. It does not work for visitors without a mail app or with webmail the browser does not know, and any address written in a page can be collected by spam bots. For those reasons, many support pages offer a mailto link next to a contact form or a chat.

Paperlink AI is one way to add that chat: it answers customer questions from your help pages and documents, and when they do not hold the answer it offers your support email, your support page or a button that sends the conversation to your team. To add questions and answers to the same page, use the FAQ schema generator; to tidy pasted page code, use the HTML cleaner.