Google Chrome: Add a Send Link Button to the Bookmarks Bar
Contributed by Rob Rogers 
Tagged: Google Most browsers provide you with a way to easily email a link to the page you are currently viewing. When clicked, your default email application will produce a new message with the link in the body and the page title in the Subject line and the To field left blank for you to address. This functionality is missing from Chrome, but can easily added by creating a button on the Bookmarks bar.
1. Open Chrome.
2. Right-click the Bookmarks bar and select Add Page.
3. In the Name textbox, input the word Send Link.
4. In the URL textbox, input the following:
javascript:location.href='mailto:?SUBJECT='+document.title+'&BODY='+escape(location.href);
5. Make sure that the Bookmarks bar folder is selected and click OK.
or just drag this link to your Bookmarks bar: Send Link.
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Kipp said on October 1, 2008
This is awesome, thanks!!
crispinr said on October 4, 2008
hi – how would I amend your (great) script so I can force the Send To to use GMail? Thanks!
Rob Rogers said on October 4, 2008
I’ve noticed that people have been having mixed results with trying to do this. I would recommend using an application called ChromeMailer to easily set Gmail as the default for all mailto: links. It requires Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0.
DavidP said on October 9, 2008
Excellent! Thanks.
Asm said on October 25, 2008
Hi, first I apologize for my ignorance, I really do. I have followed the instructions as above. I thus have “send to” link in the bookmark folder . Here is the ignorant part: I click on it and nothing happens. No form pops up. I tried to highlight some text then click on send to, still nothing….I highlight the address bar and click on send to, nothing….
john said on October 27, 2008
Freaking amazing! Thanks much. Gotta believe Google will add this upon vrelease!1
John said on November 2, 2008
How easy was that ! Have been annoyed ever since first using Chrome that there was no way to send a link but with a few simple strokes problem solved. Thanks, Cheers, John.
John said on November 2, 2008
Maybe I wrote too soon, have tried several sites and when I try to send link I get the following message
Error 300 (net::ERR_INVALID_URL): Unknown error.
What to do now ?? John.
John said on November 2, 2008
Relax John, silly me got : and ; wrong. All OK now Thanks again sorry for my mistake, have deleted first try. John.
Jonna Mackin said on November 6, 2008
You left no way to comment and paste in the url once you are in the add page screen, so I had to type in the url for send link, which was a pain!
Jo said on November 20, 2008
Genius!
fourstar said on November 20, 2008
I use this functionality all the time. Excellent, thank you.
Now how about those pesky mouse gestures, grrrr.
B alert said on December 5, 2008
lack of Send Link button had been a big inconvenience using Chrome.
Big improvement now, thank you; ‘ may make Chrome my default browser
if I can learn how to import bookmarks etc from Firefox rather than I.E..
(‘only open IE to install critical updates.)
CJV said on December 8, 2008
Dude you have just democratized javascript!
Thanks,
CJV
DavidL said on December 12, 2008
Nice work…however I would prefer to have this as a menu item, instead of having to toggle the Bookmarks Bar each time…any suggestions?
Hussein said on December 13, 2008
Works ..Thanks .
Joe said on December 16, 2008
Very Nice Thanks
ravi7640 said on December 19, 2008
Great ! It works perfectly. Chrome team should make this feature official.
Ali said on December 30, 2008
the instructions above were just perfect and helped… now, i can send link as easy as it is in IE…
Anonymous said on January 1, 2009
That’s really cool. If you had a whole set of bookmarks in a folder, how would you send all the links together in one email and then choose the subject title? The code seems to work for single sites.
Thanks,
PK
Svet said on January 4, 2009
This works. But how do you send an actual page in an e-mail (not the link)?
mecheng said on January 8, 2009
How go I get gmail to be my default email program?
mecheng said on January 8, 2009
More to the poit how do I get the send link button to send a gmail message?
netter said on January 13, 2009
I have the french version of google chrome. What is the bookmarks bar. I have tried to right click on all bars I could find and all icons and nowhere did I find “Add Page” or a french equivalent which would require a name and an URL.
netter said on January 13, 2009
Sorry. I did find it . The name is completely different. It’s called favorites manager. And it’s a new favorite you want to create called “send link”
Don said on January 16, 2009
The link button worked great, after I installed Gmail notifier to get it open in gmail instead of Outlook.
Thank you.
P.S. Is it possible to have a script that also will copy any highlighted text and paste it into the email?
Anonymous said on January 24, 2009
Don, that worked for me to, good suggestion.
rksue said on January 29, 2009
Worked great. Thanks
David said on February 1, 2009
Thanks so much with the “Send Link” trick for Google Chrome – works very well.
Arcoiris said on February 15, 2009
Many many thanks :)
excellent |!!
Speak for Many said on February 20, 2009
THANK YOU IMMENSELY!!!
Moshe Hackner said on February 25, 2009
Thank you very much for posting this.
David said on March 18, 2009
I just feet an irrepressible urge to join the already loud chorus saying: THANK YOU … this has been my one main quarrel with Chrome (I ditched FF in favor of Chrome, just love it). I know other people talk about lack of RSS support but i’m like meh. This trick/tool/tip or whatever else you’d like to call it is just awesome. Thanks again… now i’m inspired to find a similarly concise solution to global warming :)
sumod said on March 27, 2009
Excellent, works perfectly thanks!
ajishgopan said on March 31, 2009
Thanks for this.
But when I click on the “Send link” bookmark, the outlook window opens up alright with the subject line. But the body is blank.
Any clues?
ajishgopan
Grunt101 said on April 6, 2009
rockin’ man… the bookmark link is well handy but useless if you don’t use Outlook!
this is a perfect fix! thanks so much
Bill said on April 9, 2009
Brilliant, thanks
IleneG said on April 17, 2009
This is so cool…and it worked first time for this non-geek person!
smt121 said on April 23, 2009
works great
Tony said on May 3, 2009
Sweet!
Gar said on May 6, 2009
How would you know how to do that, that’s amazing, thanks a bunch
Sharon said on June 2, 2009
It would be helpful if a print preview was provided
for the Google Chrome: Add a Send Link Button
Anthony said on June 23, 2009
Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!
Alan said on June 29, 2009
That worked the nuts, but how do you add a button on the Bookmarks Bar to simply open Outlook….Al
MFortGarry said on July 1, 2009
AWESOME… I would really like to use Google Chrome as my default browser, but the lack of this function always drove me back to IE or Firefox… how frustrating… and your option to just drag the link to the Bookmarks was incredibly simple…thanks
Laurie said on July 10, 2009
Almost gave up Chrome purely because this feature is missing so tried this and it seemed to work fine for most sites.
But, when I wanted to use it seriously for the first time it does not put the link in the body.
The site that is failing is http://b2evolution.net/index.php – can anyone tell me why the script doesn’t work with this site?
Anonymous said on July 17, 2009
Couldn’t get it work with Gmail despite repeated tries, even with Gmail Notifier. I finally unclicked the option to use Gmail for mailto: requests, it launched Outlook Express, and when I reclicked the box in Notifier, it started working with Gmail.
Mike said on July 20, 2009
I don’t know anything about javascript, but I found the link is included int he email body if I delete the subject line part.
Laurie said on July 21, 2009
Thanks for that – I have just started on javascript in the last week and your post made me look at the title of the failing website http://b2evolution.net/index.php which contains an ‘&’ (ampersand) character. This causes the rest of this script to fail as ‘&’ is a special character in javascript and would need to be converted to & for the script to work properly.
This implies that any website containing one of javascript’s special characters (http://www.w3schools.com/jS/js_special_characters.asp) will probably cause this script to fail.
Any more experienced (then myself) javascript programmers out there who know how to fix this?
Laurie said on July 21, 2009
Fixed it – looking at the original script I saw the ‘escape’ function being applied to the link. If the escape function is also applied to the title the script then seems to works perfectly.
So if the script is modified to:
javascript:location.href=’mailto:?SUBJECT=’+escape(document.title)+’&BODY=’+escape(location.href);
it should work on all websites.
Thanks again Mike for getting me to look in the right place.
Laurie said on July 27, 2009
Excuse me for bumping this to the top of the comments, but it is fairly important:
Even though the original script is great it should be modified to:
javascript:location.href=’mailto:?SUBJECT=’+escape(document.title)+’&BODY=’+escape(location.href);
The addition of the extra ‘escape’ function around the document.title ensures that the script works if the webpage’s title contains a ’special’ javascript character such as &.
You can test this by trying the original script with the webpage http://b2evolution.net/index.php (which fails due to an & in the title). This modified script fixes the problem for this and probably many other webpages.
Anonymous said on August 11, 2009
Neat. Thanks, Thomas
Anonymous said on August 11, 2009
Great tip
Thanks
ERB
Anonymous said on September 2, 2009
Same here… I use chrome mailer so when I click on a mailto link it opens up gmail in a new tab. I don’t know if these guys are getting in the way of each other, but almost everything’s fine with the script except that the body is blank. There is no link in the email… Any idea hoe to fix that?
Anonymous said on September 5, 2009
Totally cool fix. Thanks much for this. Leads me to believe there could be all types of 3rd party buttons that could be added.
Anonymous said on September 21, 2009
Is there a way to alter the send link information so that the GMail service is opened rather than Windows Live Mail?
xsaminz said on September 26, 2009
I do this:
javascript:location.href=’https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&source=mailto&su=’+escape(document.title)+’&body=’+escape(location.href);
I dug around in Firefox to get the uri correct and then inserted that instead of the mailto:
Jim said on October 9, 2009
Worked for me. Many thanks
Anonymous said on December 3, 2009
This works for me using my gmail account to send the link.
Anonymous said on December 9, 2009
absolutely brilliant!!! thank you.
Anonymous said on December 17, 2009
Thanks!! This makes my life SOOOO much easier. I also exaggerate!! Seriously, it is great!
JudyB said on February 14, 2010
Wonderful…thanks.
Brian Hydock said on February 25, 2010
I tried this and it works. Now I am having a problem because it seems to only work the first time I try it. If I exit chome and reopen it it will work again, but only once. Did I do something wrong. Running on Windows 7 and Outlook 2007.
Ron said on February 25, 2010
sendlink does not work?
rttedrow said on April 22, 2010
Thank you for this. One thing, this send link code calls the MS Word mail program but I only use gmail. How do I alter the code to call gmail? Thanks in advance.
Richard Tedrow
Anonymous said on May 19, 2010
Thanks….you guys rock!
Khalil said on May 23, 2010
Great tip! Concise and to the point, and so easy to do! Thanks!
hapakal said on June 28, 2010
awesome!!! Thank you so much…
I was surprised Google didn’t incorporate this feature to begin with. It is something people use so much as part of their internet experience. I know i use it 5 times a day, at least. and even though it is only 2 or 3 steps to open the email program, copy&paste the page title into the subject line and then the same with the the link, this is much much faster ;-) tx!!
Anonymous said on July 19, 2010
Thanks, JJ
GaryFPatton said on August 8, 2010
You made my day with your book marklet! Thanks!!
Eric Gooch said on August 11, 2010
Google has finally created an extension for this.
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/pgphcomnlaojlmmcjmiddhdapjpbgeoc
Laurie said on August 11, 2010
From what I can make out the extension you mention only works for GMAIL and not for other mail clients (Outlook, Windows mail etc). There is an extension at https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dbeoemfhkdniadbojeencpkgmobndpai that is suppose to work with all clients but I haven’t tried it out as I don’t install extensions that require access to all of my data!
I’m really surprised that Google haven’t integrated this function into Chrome yet.
SILVER said on August 25, 2010
GREAT TIP!
WORKS JUST FINE!
Deadlifter23 said on October 18, 2010
is there a way to change the windows live mail to msn mail?
Yellerseller said on October 19, 2010
Thanks!!!!
Kyle said on October 19, 2010
how can you change the e-mail program that is opened when you click on this?
Techskilled said on January 21, 2011
Dude… Awesome… Thanks bro.
Techskilled said on January 21, 2011
i mean babe, lol
Anonymous said on January 27, 2011
Kinda lame on Google’s part not including this button. Seems like they did a half-axx job on the design. They have a ways to go to catch Firefox.
R Farley said on March 10, 2011
Absolutely Fabulous! I was just fixin to forget about Chrome Thanks
Wrolandhyattjr said on March 18, 2011
I hate to sound stupid, BUT, how do I make 2 lines in the URL?
Wrolandhyattjr said on March 18, 2011
DUH! I dragged the “Send Link” link to my toolbar and it worked! Thanks!!!!!!
Jimtrotter2 said on April 11, 2011
Great tool. thanks for the post.
Laurie said on April 11, 2011
You can split long lines of javascript with a backslash
I haven’t tried it in a button like this so let us know if it works!
Dwight said on April 26, 2011
Love Google as a browser, but why didn’t they put in a simple this like “SEND BY LINK”???????????
Lorna Mumm said on May 28, 2011
I’m having a very, very, very tough time with this!!! I am very frustrated with all this rigmarole. On Internet Explorer I right-clicked, clicked on Send To and then clicked on email. (I think it was something like that.) Besides that I almost always used ’send page’ – that suited my purpose most of the time. When will this will be fixed/changed. I’m one of those who is seriously thinking of dumping Chrome.
Luke said on August 2, 2011
Rigmarole? Just drag the ’send link’ in the article to your toolbar and its done. After that it’s one button click to work (2 less than IE as you say) How exactly is that rigmarole?
Y I said on September 22, 2011
Well when I drag the link to my bookmark bar and click on it I get a Google’s home page :(
Mathew said on October 8, 2011
Great solution! Thank you so much.
Gene said on October 11, 2011
Works-but when I go to my email and try to open the link it will not open
Islandman said on October 26, 2011
very good sir…
Bast said on November 7, 2011
Thank you ever so much. I thought I was going nuts when I didn’t see anything like this…
cautain said on November 12, 2011
Bonjour,
Merci beaucoup pour votre conseil qui marche sans problème.
Connaissez-vous une méthode pour envoyer la page entière par mail?
High! Thanks a lot for your recipe. Do you know a way to send the entire page by mail.
Alain (from France)
Corporate Magician said on November 30, 2011
Thanks that helps!
James said on December 16, 2011
This is a fantastic suggestion. I switched from IE to Chrome b/c everyone says Chrome has better security. I went crazy trying to find the send link button. You’re awesome!
Dolly Wilson said on December 18, 2011
Thank you so much! I love this “send link” and I don’t want to always send a link from my gmail, so this is great. I had it before, and missed it so much.
ml said on December 20, 2011
this was working just fine for me until yesterday.
now, an email window opens but subject now reads “&BODY=about:blank” and no link included in body.
perhaps a chrome update broke something?
any ideas to fix?
thx,
ml
RG said on January 3, 2012
Same as above – subject reads “&BODY=about:blank”
Chris said on January 5, 2012
YOU ROCK!
Helen said on January 6, 2012
I just encountered this problem today as I haven’t been using Chrome very long. Thank you so much for your solution for adding a Send Link button to the Bookmark bar. And particularly for setting it up so I could just drag it rather than trying to correctly enter the code!!
Carlitos said on January 10, 2012
There is something crazy going on with “document”. It may not be handling the “pointer” very well.
Nevertheless, to make the link work you can use:
javascript:location.href=’mailto:?SUBJECT=’+document.title+’&BODY=’+location.href;
Jester said on January 11, 2012
This worked initially but today I find that my default email app, Outlook, now opens but with the following text in the Subject line, &BODY=about:blank
The URL which used to display in the body no longer appears.
I right clicked the “Send Link” entry on the bookmark bar and looked at the contents of the entry via the “edit” option and it is exactly as before.
Playing detective for now.
Jester
Jester said on January 11, 2012
I’ve found this works on some sites and not all. It failed on a New York Times article but worked on some wilderness food web sites I just visited. Then while preparing to post my findings I tried to send the link from this site and it failed.
It does not appear that length of URL affects ability to send the link so some other setting must be stepping on this process.
Jester
Jester said on January 14, 2012
I continue to find random success and failure using the original code, Laurie’s “double escape” version and even Carlitos recent suggestion.
I’m back using Laurie’s version and it failed on http://livewellnetwork.com/Motion/7624634
30 minutes ago but just now it worked as expected using Outlook which is my default email client.
Jester
David said on January 16, 2012
Thank you so much for providing a way to send a link in an email.
This works ok, but anyone I email has to copy and paste the link into their browser as the link is not a hyperlink that they can just click on. Should I have adjusted something to make this happen?
Thanks for your help!
Charuta said on January 24, 2012
This is great! Thanks!!!
sandiekid70 said on January 25, 2012
thanks thats is so easy to do and so very helpful.
love it
Robert said on February 7, 2012
Works on some pages, but get a ‘body blank’ message on others and it doesn’t link up.