I think I just found the most awesome warning message ever. I am going to write all my dialogs like this too now. “Deleting an account is usually safe. Are you sure you wish to delete this account?”

Sending an email from a web page (via the user’s client) is surprisingly tricky. A mailto: url can do the trick but it has some severe length limitations. Sending it via a background script does not have any such limitation but the user does not get a chance to edit the email, record it to their Sent Items, etc. Using Outlook automation allows for the most flexibility but it has some bad implications: only works on IE, requires some pretty specific security setting (trusted site + “enable activex controls not marked as safe”).

For an intranet scenario, where we can be certain that most users will be using Outlook and IE, I came up with the following solution. It will attempt to send the mail using Outlook automation and fall back to a “mailto” method if not available (i.e. either they are using another browser / OS, or they don’t have the correct security settings). It is a CommonJS module, I have started using RequireJS for custom modules to prevent namespace clashes.

The tricky part was making sure the URL stayed short enough – if it gets over a certain length, Firefox will just ignore it altogether (other browser will truncate it). This is the job of the addUrlComponents function. I call it with the recipient, subject and body parameters until the length is exhausted, but each is limited – this way if there is a ton of recipients, rather than trying to keep them all and getting a blank email, it limits the total address length to 900 characters and saves the rest for the email itself. It’s not ideal either way but I figured this was preferable.

I went ahead and created a test page for it since the addUrlComponents function was not trivial… this also gave me a good occasion to use qunit – very, very easy to get running with that test framework.

PS – this gist thing is a great way to get syntax highlighting on the cheap hah!