This accurately describes the issue. There is nothing wrong with the mailto link, the mailto link fails to load. Often the webapp crashes.

The funny thing is that tel: link for telephone numbers work fine.

window.location.replace does in-fact work. Thanks!

Here is the jQuery to fix this automatically...

$( a[href^=mailto] ).click(function (event) {
    event.preventDefault();
    window.location.replace = $(this).attr( href );
    return false;
});

I think I ve figured this out. I noticed when in app-capable mode, any http link will take you out of the app and launch a separate mobile safari window, take you to the page and show the Safari chrome. Makes sense (typically one wouldn t link to anything from an "all in one" app-capable web app. I noticed this because I implemented a 4 page app with my own "tab bar" at the bottom and was linking amongst the .html files with plain http links in the a element. When I replace this with a javascript function to load the pages using document.location.replace this doesn t happen.

So, on the form - I think what must be happening is that because I m using a scheme (in this case, mailto:) somehow the browser is needed in "regular mode" to interpret the scheme and do the right thing by launching the email app and this clearly doesn t work when submitting a form. I haven t yet found anything in the Apple documentation specifically about this, so if anyone knows the technical details, please do post!

UPDATE: I did find that I can access a server side script using a form in web-app mode, so I m still curious about the mailto: issue, if anyone has an answer.

Thanks,

Elisabeth

I am having the exact same issue with mailto links not working in the web capable mode. I just got done submitting a bug report to Apple. Let s see what happens, meanwhile I found another dev. platform for web apps that works in web capable mode and mailto links work, but it is funny how it works in this even--it is not as fluid as it is in Safari. Because even in this new web dev tool that I found, it closes your app and launches mail client, which is lame. In Safari it just slides in a mail window that slides back out if you hit cancel or send--it doesn t actually close your app.

Here is a workaround that does not depend on JQuery:

aTmp = document.createElement("a");
aTmp.href="mailto:example@example.com?subject=Test&body=Hello.";
aTmp.click();

Update: To run this code from a bookmarklet you have to wait about 1000 ms before the bookmarks bezel is closed and the browser is ready to respond. I realized this by wrapping the code in a setTimeout function.