发送电子邮件HTML / HTML5

Question

A friend of mine has to send a normal email using ONLY HTML/HTML5 (or CSS/CSS3, but that will be of little use for this problem) for his school. His classmates already said that can't be done without mailto: etc., but the teacher insisted it was possible. What do you guys of Stackoverflow think? We read about setting up you own smtp-client, but there was no example and we are not experienced with HTML5.

Thanks in advance.

EDIT:

If you guys think you know a way to fool the teacher, for example use ServerSide Scripting without let the teacher know, we'll accept it as well ;).

Edit 2: I was unclear in the question; the prblem is to SEND an email without mailto: etc. using HTML, not an email containing HTML

Answer 1

There used to be cross-protocol hacks based on POSTing a form to a different port. With carefully crafted payload and fault-tolerance on the server side you could make form data appear as a different protocol, eg IRC, SMPT or FTP. This is obvious opportunity for abuse (eg turning every website visitor into a spambot), so these holes have been patched in browsers:

• http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070325/javascript-spam/

• http://www.remote.org/jochen/sec/hfpa/hfpa.pdf

Within intended scope of the standard you can't send an e-mail without server-side help or mailto: protocol.

"HTML5" WebSockets are not raw TCP/IP sockets, so you can't use them to connect to non-WebSockets servers. You are not allowed to use port 25 with them, and the handshake required for WebSocket connection is not compatible with the SMTP protocol.

Answer 2

You can send any kind of HTML including HTML5 in a mail. The problem is, that most mail-clients do not support every kind of HTML message for security purpose.

Read this article to have an overview how to format a HTML mail:

http://www.sitepoint.com/code-html-email-newsletters/

General rule: keep it as simple as possible. Second rule: Test it with a big variety of mail-clients because they can all behave different.