1) Submitting the URL encoded output of a form to the mail system instead of
the server. Here specifying the subject as a hidden field could be used to
identify which form produced the mail when multiple forms are sent to the
same mail account.
2) When used in conjunction with an anchor tag such as <ADDRESS><A
href="mailto:jonsm@aol.com" TITLE="my subject">Jon Smirl</A></ADDRESS> This
causes a popup sendmail dialog.
3) Embedding the UI for sending normal SMTP mail into a Web page. For example
a page to post a message to html-wg.
<FORM action="mailto:html-wg@oclc.org">
Subject:<INPUT type=text name=subject>
<TEXTAREA name=body>
<INPUT type=submit value="Send message to Html-wg">
</FORM>
In this cause the body field overrides the URL encoded output. All mail
headers and the body can be initialized by using the form fields.
As a side effect the third form can be used to eliminate the need for
building a special sendmail dialog into the browser. In case two the browser
would instead open a popup window and format an internally stored sendmail
page into it. This is what my system does.
Jon Smirl, jonsm@aol.com