Add Me To Your Favourites

September 11, 2009 4:31 AM

I need to send a link in an email which on the other end will create a favourite in in the recipients IE. I've googled around this and found lots of resources on adding a favourite from a website but they all seem to assume the recipient is on the right page already. I'm using Outlook 2007 if it's relevant. (Bit dull as a question I know but I've been wrestling with this all morning)
posted by eb98jdb to computers & internet (8 comments total)

If you're using HTML in the email, you could try:

<a href="javascript:window.external.addFavorite('http://www.website.com','Website Title');">
Click here to add the page to your favorites!</a>

posted by mahke at 4:57 AM on September 11

I suspect it's a bad idea in the first place - why not just ask them to add it themselves?

If you're determined, mahke's link will work, but you probably need to put the whole thing in an attached .htm file so that they open it in their web browser rather than their email client.
posted by samj at 5:07 AM on September 11

Can you guarantee that all the recipients are using IE in Windows, have HTML enabled, and will accept/allow the file? Because you'll need that.

(Heck even if you're sure of all that, this might be a bit rude anyway. A link to the website is enough. If you really want an Add to Favorites, put it on the resulting page.)
posted by rokusan at 5:18 AM on September 11 [1 favorite has favorites]

I would love to be able to do this for my mom. Not rude at all. She would so appreciate it.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 6:17 AM on September 11

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your help so far.

Mahke, when I try your HTML, I get the message 'Internet Explorer Cannot Download' and then 'Unspecified Error'

Any thoughts?
posted by eb98jdb at 6:54 AM on September 11

You can't do this. Any combination of operating system, html-mode e-mail client, and target browser that were in combination vulnerable to executing an automatic bookmarking link would also be vulnerable to executing an automatic open-all-your-bookmarks-at-once link, and would be nearly vulnerable to a delete-everything-on-your-hard-drive link.

Think about it: This is a really bad idea, and since the possibility of malware dawned on them, software engineers make it a priority to prevent this from happening.
posted by gum at 7:29 AM on September 11

Generally javascript is disabled in mail readers, 99.999% of the time it's a huge security risk.

You can try the following: http://nospam.unixcab.org/test.html but it doesn't seem to work in IE8 for me.
posted by reptile at 7:32 AM on September 11

Conceivably, you could create the Favorite on your machine and just email them the .url file with instructions on where to save it.
posted by JaredSeth at 9:20 AM on September 11