Using MailTo: in a VBA macro

So yesterday I wrote a VBA macro where I wanted the end user to be able to send me some information generated by the tool the macro is a part of. I am pretty good at programming Outlook to do things for me using VBA, but I don't want to assume that's what the end user uses.

The alternative I came up with was using the mailto: command or link or whatever it is. It's the same thing you see in a web page when someone embeds their email address, you click it, and Windows pops up your default email editor with the author specified in the to: line. In a search I came up with this page that shows how you can not only specify the to: line, but also the subject and body. Perfect for what I want to do.

So all I had to do was make a VBA function to build a nice mailto: line based on input, and here's what I came up with:

Public Sub StartEmail(ToAddr As String, Optional Subject As String, Optional Body As String)
Dim URL As String
URL = "Mailto:" & ToAddr
If Subject <> "" Then
URL = URL & "?subject=" & Subject
If Body <> "" Then
URL = URL & "&body=" & Body
End If
ElseIf Body <> "" Then
URL = URL & "?body=" & Body
End If

Navigate URL
End Sub

The function simply takes in a mandatory to: argument, and optional subject and/or body, and builds a mailto: link like this.

The last link in this whole chain is calling the mailto: link so Windows can deal with it. I just call a sub I call navigate, which is really just calling the Windows ShellExecute API function. I just set it up in a separate module in pretty much any project I do because i usually end up using it for something, usually just letting Windows deal with opening a file or link, instead of me having to deal with it.

Private Declare Function ShellExecute Lib "shell32.dll" Alias "ShellExecuteA" _
(ByVal hWnd As Long, ByVal lpOperation As String, ByVal lpFile As String, ByVal _
lpParameters As String, ByVal lpDirectory As String, ByVal nShowCmd As Long) As _
Long

Private Const SW_SHOW = 1

Public Sub Navigate(ByVal NavTo As String)
Dim hBrowse As Long
hBrowse = ShellExecute(0&, "open", NavTo, "", "", SW_SHOW)
End Sub


So yeah, anyway, now I have a nice easy one-line call to open up an email with whatever I want filled in. To be honest I've only tried it on my work machine which has Outlook as the default mail app, so your mileage may vary with other apps.