Java and Electronic Mail - Java - page 683

Sending Email: Browser Version

Problem

You want an applet to permit the user to compose and send email, but hide your email ad-
dress.

Solution

One approach is to use a mailto: URL hidden in some Java code. This is a somewhat
heavyweight approach—you could do this with a shorter piece of JavaScript code—but this
is the Java Cookbook , and this is one of the places where Java applets remain useful.

Discussion

Because most web browsers are now configured with either built-in or connected email cli-
ents, you can use the mailto: URL as a poor-person's email composer to have users contact
you. Many people prefer this to a fill-in-the-blank “mail” form connected to a script or ser-
vlet because they can use a specialized tool and save their own copy of the mail either in
their log file or by CC'ing their own account. Although you could use a mailto: URL direc-
tly in HTML, experience suggests that a species of parasite called a spam perpetrator will at-
tach itself permanently to your mailbox if you do:

<h1> <h1> Test </h1> <p> Here is how to <<a

href= "mailto:[e-mail]?subject=Testing Mailto URL
&amp;cc=[e-mail]" > contact us </a>

</h1> <p>

</a>

(The href line should be written as one long line in a real HTML file; the &cc is intention-
ally expanded as an HTML entity inside the href attribute).

My approach is to hide the mailto: URL inside a Java applet, where spam perps are less
likely to notice it. The applet uses showDocument() to activate the mailto: URL:

String theURL = "mailto:" + username;
URL targetURL = new URL(theURL);
getAppletContext.showDocument(targetURL);