mailto: replacement due to size

Question

I have a web page that generates several email addresses. I need to be able to click on a link, which will open an email client such as outlook and populate the bcc field with those email addresses. In the past, we have used html's mailto, which achieves this goal perfectly.

My problem now is that I need to send emails to over 200 people, and mailto cannot handle that much information. Since the page also uses PHP, I have considered PHP's mail() and phpmailer(), but since both require that the entire email be generated on the page and the email client is never opened, they will not work.

Does anybody know of an alternative method I can implement to achieve this functionality?

Answer 1

Create a mailing list, add those e-mails to the mailing-list and send mail there instead.

As a bonus, you can use VERP to prune invalid addresses.

Answer 2

I don't think there is a convenient alternative method.

• You could offer a textarea field containing all the addresses in a comma-separated list. That list could be easily copy+pasted into the client's E-Mail program.

• If the client's E-Mail is on the same domain as the web site, and you have full control over your server, you could randomly generate E-Mail addresses on your server using PHP:

  [email protected]
  

  that E-Mail address would be configured to forward incoming mail (that your user with the mail client writes and sends to that one random address) to the big list of recipients. This is a very advanced method but hard to implement.

Answer 3

Maybe you can make an email group, depending on your mail system, such that when you send a mail to the address of the group, it will distribute to all members?

On our company, we have several groups. [email protected], [email protected], [email protected] etc. Sending one e-mail to such an address will make all members of the respective group receiving it.

Answer 4

MailTo with a Copy

<a href="mailto:[email protected][email protected]">

MailTo with a Blind Copy

<a href="mailto:[email protected][email protected]">