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While writing a library code to generate URI strings, I got confused about mailto. According to RFC 3986 authority for a URI must be preceded by //. Authority is the part of URI where the userinfo and host resides in userinfo@host syntax. According to this RFC the format should be: mailto://me@host.com. However, it is used as mailto:me@host.com not just in the wild but also shown like that in RFC 2368 and RFC 6068.

The only way mailto being a URI is that the email is appended as path, which doesn't make much sense. Is this assumption correct or is there another point I am missing.

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Cem Kalyoncu
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  • Oh, I searched it for a while, but never thought someone would use URL instead of URI. It indeed answers my question. I think I would edit that answer and the question a little so that it would be found when someone searches like I did. – Cem Kalyoncu Jun 09 '16 at 18:56

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It seems that mailto is a URN, even if it feels a bit strange. Thus in mailto:me@host.com, me@host.com is indeed path for URI as described in RFC 3986

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