GmailThis! – An Excellent Gmail bookmarklet – Tips & Tweaks

GmailThis! has to be one of the most useful bookmarklet’s I have in my browser toolbar. It let’s me open a Gmail compose window with the Subject line and the email body with the URL of the website I am currently at, already filled in.This makes it so easy to email anyone an email with just the link or send an email with the link in context already pre-filled for you. If you do this a lot, you can imagine how much time this will save you from not having to open up Gmail, compose an email, go back to the site you were at and copy the url, fill in the subject line and then paste the link to the website. All this happens with a click on this bookmarklet.

How do I use this?

1. Drag to your browser bookmarks toolbar.
2. Make sure you are logged in to Gmail already
3. Click on ‘GmailThis!’ bookmarklet you just created to send this post to someone you know.

Here is a video showing how to use this:
How to use GmailThis!

Tips & Tweaks

I have to thank Daniel Mertens for asking this question in the comments in my post on Top Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail 2.0. He asked me if there was a way to have separate buttons with the ‘to’ address filled in with frequently used email addresses. I didn’t know of a Greasemonkey Script that did this but figured I could tweak the GmailThis! script to do just that.

It is a very simple tweak and those who are familiar with tweaking javascript would have no trouble following this. And you probably already know how to do this.

For those who are new to it, I will try to make it as straight forward as possible and if you break it you can always start over with a fresh copy and try again.

A Look inside GmailThis!

Let’s take a look at the javascript code that makes up the bookmarklet. You can get this code by right-clicking on the bookmark and choose Properties. You will find this code in the ‘Location’ field.

Does it make your head spin? No worries. You can see in the picture where to grab this code.

Let’s look at the part that we are interested in changing.

that’s the part that adds the Url of the webpage you are in to the body of the email.

A few parameters you can add to autofill are ‘to’, ‘cc’, & ‘bcc’. For eg: if you want to create a bookmarklet to email your wife with the link and subject autofilled, you would add this string to the above bookmarklet:

‘&to=’ + escape(’yourwifesemail@web.com’) +

This is what the whole script will look like with the above code inserted:

That’s it!

You create copies of this bookmarklet, rename it and then change the code with the new email updated for every script to create multiple bookmarklets, each for your frequent contact.

GmailThis! for hosted Google Apps

While looking around to see if someone has already posted about this, I came across a thread in Google Groups which showed how you can change the above script so it works with Gmail for your hosted Google Apps.

If you replace the [MYDOMAIN.COM] with your own website url, this bookmarklet should work for your Google Apps Gmail. I haven’t tested this bit but the thread seems to suggest it should work.

If there is any better way of doing this, I would love to hear it in the comments.

GmailThis! Script Credit: Doug

GmailThis! for hosted Google Apps Credit: Google Groups thread

Update: Apparently, I can’t add javascript code displayed in posts just with the <code> tag. I have resorted to doing screenshots instead and I have to find a way to display actual code in the future. If you know how,  I would love to learn how from you. In fact, I am going to ask Doug as he is displaying it right now in his post. Not sure if he uses WordPress though.