Gmail strips body out of mailto links

Question

I've been seeing this issue on a website I support, and have confirmed it is the case elsewhere as well.

When using a mailto link for sharing a URL, I see that some clients are fine with displaying the body field from the mailto link in the email, while Gmail strips it out.

I've seen a few related questions here but none suggesting a fix or workaround.

I've also seen some mention that the body field is non-standard, but it seems that it is required that it be honored in the spec.

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6068#page-7

The creator of a 'mailto' URI cannot expect the resolver of a URI to understand more than the "subject" header field and "body". Clients that resolve 'mailto' URIs into mail messages MUST be able to correctly create [RFC5322]-compliant mail messages using the
"subject" header field and "body".

Is Gmail therefore non-compliant?

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To demonstrate the behavior I am seeing, with Gmail as your default email client, paste the following into your browser url bar: mailto:?subject=qux&body=xyzzy

If your experience is consistent with mine, you will not have a body in the Gmail message, and will only have a subject. Upon inspection, you may see that the url bar for the Gmail webapp reads something like the following: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailto&su=qux, with su representing the subject field from the original mailto url, and sure enough, no field representing body.

Now, changing your default email client (I tried with the Mail macOS application) you will see both subject and body populated.

Has anyone had any luck getting the specified behavior working in Gmail?

Answer 1

Gmail omits all query string parameters after the first one separated by an unencoded ampersand. So if you put ?subject first, you get only subject; if you put ?body first, you get only the body. I changed this:

<a href="mailto:?body=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com&amp;subject=Testing">

to this, with the ampersand encoded as %26:

<a href="mailto:?body=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%26subject=Testing">

...and it works in Gmail, but Mail.app gets the entire query string as the email body. But as I said, Gmail omits everything after the first unencoded ampersand. So I repeated both body and subject with unencoded ampersands, and this seems to work everywhere:

<a href="mailto:?body=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%26subject=Testing&amp;body=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com&amp;subject=Testing">