Mailto

Mailto makes it easy to create mailto templates that customers can use to communicate quickly and efficiently with you. The result? You don't have to worry about the complexity of "contact us" forms, weird pop-up chat windows, and all that non-sense. It's just conversation between you and your customer over email.

Run from the root of your Rails application:

$ bundle add "mailto"

Then install it by running:

$ ./bin/rails generate mailto:install

This creates the ./app/mailtos directory and populates it with a few example templates, like ./app/mailtos/support.txt.erb.

Create a mailto template in the app/mailtos/support.txt.erb folder that looks like this:

---
subject: Having trouble at <%= request.url %>
to: support@example.com
---

Greetings,

I was trying to request the page <%= request.url %> and it said there was an error. Could you please have a look?

Here's my browser information: <%= request.user_agent %>

Cheers!

Then load the mail_to_template :support, "send us an email" view helper from any of your views:

<h1>Get help!</h1>

<p>
  If you're still having trouble after reading our <a href="/support">support docs</a>, you can
  <% mail_to_template :support, "send us an email" %> and we'll check it out.
</p>

When the user clicks on the link, they'll get an email that's populated with the contents of your template.

Rocketship uses mailto templates on its websites, like Legible News to streamline communications with customers.

Here's what it looks like for an error when a page isn't found:

---
subject: Not found error at <%= request.url %>
to: support@legiblenews.com
---

Greetings,

I was trying to request the page <%= request.url %> and it said it couldn't be found, but I'm pretty sure this should work. Could you please have a look?

Cheers!

When the customer clicks on the "email support" link, the templates is populated in their email:

Open an recreatable issue or a PR with a fix and tests.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.