Email QR Code Generator
Scan, and a message opens already addressed — subject and text included.
An email QR code encodes a mailto: link, so scanning it opens the phone’s mail app with the address already filled in. Adding a subject line turns it into something more useful than a shortcut: a code on a poster whose replies arrive pre-labelled, or one on an invoice whose subject already carries the reference number.
Fill in the fields above and the code appears here.
How it works
Enter the address
This is the only required field; the rest are optional.
Add a subject and body if useful
Both are pre-filled and both stay editable by the sender.
Download
SVG for print, PNG for a screen or an email signature.
What mailto: can and cannot pre-fill
The link format is mailto:[email protected]?subject=...&body=..., and everything after the question mark is a suggestion the mail client is free to honour or ignore. Address, subject and body are supported almost everywhere. Carbon copy and blind copy are supported by most desktop clients and inconsistently on mobile, which is why they are not offered here.
Anything unusual in those values has to be percent-encoded, since a raw ampersand would be read as the start of another parameter and a raw newline would break the link. That encoding is applied automatically as you type, which is why the code changes shape when you add a comma or an apostrophe to the subject.
The pre-filled text is not locked. Whoever scans the code sees a normal draft message and can edit or delete every part of it before sending, including the recipient. Treat the subject line as a helpful default for sorting replies, never as something you can rely on arriving intact.
Where an email code earns its place
It is most useful where typing is awkward and context is valuable. A code on a piece of equipment whose subject line carries the serial number means a fault report arrives already identified. A code on a conference poster with the subject "Poster 34 enquiry" sorts itself into the right folder without anyone thinking about it.
It is least useful on a website, where a plain link does the same job with one tap and no camera. QR codes solve the problem of moving information from a physical surface to a device; on a screen that problem does not exist, and a code the reader has to photograph with a second device is worse than a link.
One caution about putting an address on a public surface: it will be harvested. The text inside a QR code is trivially extracted at scale, and an address printed on a poster in a public place ends up on spam lists exactly as a plain-text address on a web page does. For anything long-lived, a role address you can retire beats a personal one.