Adding an email 'mailto' link to course navbar

Question

Hi,

My team would love to add an Email link to our course nav bars to make contacting us easy for participants and visible throughout the course. Ideally, we would love to add a custom link with a mailto URL as the destination, but it seems like this might not be possible.

Adding a custom link with a value of mailto:name@google.com will direct users to google.com instead of opening a new message in the default email client.

We would like to use a custom link rather than the built-in 'Email' link as our courses have a central email address (not tied to a Brightspace user) that we direct course inquiries to. The built-in 'Email' messaging seems ideal for contacting individual users (like an instructor or admin), but does not fit our use case of 'course-wide email'.

Is there a way to add mailto links to the navbar and have them open a user's default email client?

Best,

Matthew

Matthew.T.222 · Answer

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your response and for suggesting some alternatives. Per your suggestion, I created PIE item 10734 to add this feature. As I mention in the PIE submission, a navbar link would be ideal as it would be accessible from any page in a course (as opposed to a custom/Announcement widget post, only visible on the homepage) and available to participants in one click (as opposed to linking to a webpage, finding the email, and clicking again).

Could you elaborate more on why the form cannot accept a mailto value? The custom link form field seems to accept any text value (without validation) and I am able to include the value of mailto:name@google.com. The issue that occurs is the navbar then prepends http:// to that value when adding it to the href attribute.

Screenshot 2023-09-13 at 8.08.39 AM.png

I understand this is still a feature request and will require an update, but curious to hear why accepting a mailto: value in the form field would go against the HTML specification?

Best,

Matt

Chris.S.534 · Answer

Hi Matthew,

According to the html specification a MAILTO URL ia a value of the href attribute. The custom navbar link form field will not accept this or any variant in which you can present this to a user, as such cant be done.

However the idea to add an email link directly to a course navbar is a good one and you should consider a submission into the Product Idea Exchange

Some alternatives to consider:

* Create a custom widget placed on the course homepage with contact information
* Create an Announcement  with contact information and Pin it to the top of the Announcements widget
* Create a standard contact us html document & create a custom navbar link to it, using replace strings, so that it can be used across all courses

Hope that helps!