Note:
If you are here only to see the bug and solution, please skip the following paragraphs in italic and go straighahead to the content below line “+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++”.
It is pretty common to include an “email us” button on a page. The behavior of most of “email us” buttons is that when user clicks on the button, their default email client will popup a new window to compose a new email, probably with pre-populated “to” field, “subject” field, etc. Pretty standard stuff.
The simple code that needs to be attached to the button looks something like this:
[1] <a href=”mailto:johnDoe@example.com?subject=Hi”>email John Doe</a>
If you need to include the alias of the email address, use carrots before and after the actual email address. Something like this:
[2] <a href=”mailto:John Doe<johnDoe@example.com>?subject=Hi”>email John Doe</a>
If you need to include 2 email addresses in the “to” field, use comma to separate the addresses, like this:
[3] <a href=”mailto:johnDoe@example.com, maryDoe@example.com?subject=Hi”>email John and Mary</a>
So it is natural to think that you can combine the 2 techniques above to include 2 email addresses with their aliases like this:
[4] <a href=”mailto:John Doe<johnDoe@example.com>,Mary Doe <maryDoe@example.com> ?subject=Hi”>email John and Mary Doe</a>
Ha. There. You are about to run into a problem that I did yesterday.
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The bug is when you include multiple email addresses with their aliases in the “to” field. If you use the code as the above line [4] in red, you are gonna only get the first email address (John Doe’s) prepopulated in the “to” field of your Outlook window, if you are on one of the following browser/OS combinations:
[+] IE6 on Windows XP
[+] Firefox 2 on Windows XP
[+] IE7 on Windows Vista
[+] Firefox 3 on Windows Vista
I have tried to replace the spaces with “%20″ and the carrots with “<” and “>”, “%3E” and “%3C”, tried to replace “,” by “;”, but found little help. Below are the “solutions” I have come up so far… Obviously I am not happy with any of them.
[Solution A]:
Get rid of Mary’s email completely from the script. Set up the mail server so that all emails John received will be forwarded to Mary by the server automatically.
[Solution B]:
Get rid of both the aliases and the carrots, so the script looks like line [3] in green above.
[Solution C]:
Tell your users that it is time for them to get a MAC. 
Please let me know if you have other solutions in the comments. Will be much appreciated.
