Shortcuts to Launch E-mail Messages

I would like to put a shortcut on my desktop that will start Microsoft Outlook with a specific address or list of addresses entered in the To field. Is there any way to do this?
Tom Collen

Yes, you can create a shortcut to launch a new e-mail message that has the recipient and various other fields preloaded with the data of your choice. We'll start with a simple shortcut that just opens a blank new e-mail message in your default e-mail client. Right-click on the desktop and choose New Shortcut. The Create Shortcut wizard will prompt you for the location of the item—enter mailto: and click on Next. Enter a name for the shortcut and click on Finish. Double-click on the new shortcut to make sure it correctly launches a new, blank e-mail message.
Now we'll define a recipient. Right-click on the shortcut you just created, choose Properties from the menu, and edit the URL field. Add two e-mail addresses separated by a comma, and click on OK (for example mailto:bill@gates.com, steve@ballmer.com) . Launch the shortcut and check whether your e-mail program accepts the addresses. If it doesn't, change the separator between the addresses from a comma to a semicolon. The comma is technically correct, per the RFC 2368 document that defines the mailto: protocol, but some clients (including Outlook) require a semicolon instead.

You can add other fields to the URL using the form name=value. The first such field must be preceded by a question mark, and any additional fields must be preceded by an ampersand. The cc= and bcc= fields can be used to add recipients, the subject= field defines the subject, and you can even include a little text for the message itself with the body= field. The subject= and body= fields are tricky, though, because many special characters must be encoded. Every space has to be replaced by %20, and any new lines in the message body are represented by %0D%0A. Beyond that, it's easiest to avoid any characters other than letters, numbers, and these few safe punctuation marks: $ - _ . + ! * ' ( ) , (dollar sign, hyphen, underscore, period, plus, exclamation mark, asterisk, single quote, open parenthesis, close parenthesis, and comma).

Here's a sample mailto: URL that uses all the elements described above. It creates an e-mail with a particular subject and body and sends it to several recipients:

mailto:santa@northpole.com;boss_elf@ northpole.com?cc=rudolph@northpole. com&subject=This%20week&body=Been%20 good%20again.%0D%0AReally!

Some e-mail clients, particularly older ones, have trouble with complex mailto: URLs. Outlook 97 didn't properly handle multiple fields in the URL, nor did versions of Outlook Express before 5.0. That's why it's important to start simple the first time you try.