I spent two weekends building an email client that ran entirely from a mailto: link and the user's native mail handler. It worked. Nobody wanted it.

The pitch: every contact form on the web should be a mailto: link with the body pre-filled. No backend, no rate-limiting, no spam filters needed because the spammer has to open Mail.app to send it. The web was already this, in 1997, and we forgot.

I built a generator. Paste any HTML form, get back a mailto: with the field values templated in. It worked beautifully on iOS, badly on Android, and not at all on machines where the user had never configured a default mail client — which turned out to be most machines.

That last fact ended the project. You cannot ship a webmail client whose dependency is "the user has, at some point in the last decade, set up email on their computer." That is a 1990s assumption.

I am leaving the repo up. It still works for me. That is enough.