fluent-mailto

A fluent library for creating mailto links in javascript.

Testing

• npm test

Build

• npm run build

Problem statement

I couldn't find any libraries that made it simple to define mailto links in javascript code.

For example, when asked to add a mailto link with prepolated data in a react component, no one wants to reinvent the wheel:

1. conditionally combining receipients, body, subject, cc, and bcc with ?
2. encoding the headers to handle whitespaces, newlines, etc. (i.e. encodeURI and encodeURIComponent)

Furthermore, it can be frustrating either:

1. Not being able to define a mailto link concisely
2. Defining a new helper function to abstract this formatting code

Example Usage

fluent-mailto makes it easier to define mailto links in javascript:

Basic

import { mail } from 'fluent-mailto';

...

render() {
	const { recipient, subject, body } = this.props;

	const mailto = mail.to(recipient)
		.subject(subject)
		.body(body)
		.build();

    return (
	    <a href={mailto}>Click here</a>
    );
}

Order agnostic

import { mail } from 'fluent-mailto';

describe('mail', () => {
	it('order does not matter', () => {
		const first = mail.to('example.com').subject('hello world!').build();
		const second = mail.subject('hello world!').to('example.com').build();

		expect(first).toEqual(second);
	});
});

Immutable Builder

import { mail } from 'fluent-mailto';

...

constructor() {
  this.mailtoBase = mail.to('[email protected]').cc('[email protected]');
}

render() {
  const { customers } = this.props;

  return customers
    .map(this.getCustomBody)
    .map((body) => this.mailBase.body(body).build())
    .map((mailto, index) => {
      return <a key={index} href={mailto}>Click here</a>;
    });
}

private getCustomBody(customer) {
  // ... Custom logic
}

Next steps

1. I haven't conducted performance testing
2. If you are using strange emails, like [email protected]&[email protected]&body=hello that are technically supported by RFC2368, this library might not be right for you. Need to investigate more how to augment encodeURI or encodeURIComponent to support:

Within mailto URLs, the characters "?", "=", "&" are reserved.

Because the "&" (ampersand) character is reserved in HTML, any mailto
URL which contains an ampersand must be spelled differently in HTML
than in other contexts.  A mailto URL which appears in an HTML
document must use "&" instead of "&".