Free Email QR Code Generator
One scan opens a new email with your address in the To field, a subject already chosen and a message already started. The person types their sentence and sends. You get a mail that lands in the right place, because you decided the subject line, not them.
Loading the generatorβ¦
The subject line is the whole point
Most people think an email QR code saves someone from typing an address. That's the small benefit. The real one is that you choose the subject line before they do.
An email arriving as "Support β Machine 4" or "Quote request β Lyon trade show" or "Room 214 β housekeeping" sorts itself. Your inbox rules see it, your shared mailbox routes it, your helpdesk tags it, and nobody has to read a message that starts with "hi, sorry to bother you" to work out what it's about.
Print a different subject on each poster, each machine, each stand, and your inbox becomes a sorted queue without a single line of software. That's worth considerably more than the seconds saved on typing.
How to create yours
- Enter the address. A service address β
contact@,support@,hello@β rather than a personal one. There's a reason, and it's two sections below. - Write the subject. This is the field that does the work. Make it specific enough to route on: location, machine, event, department.
- Add a first line if it helps. A prompt like "Tell us what happened and when:" gets you a better message than an empty box. Keep it short.
- Style it, test it, download it. Your colours, one of five pattern shapes, your logo in the middle, a frame that says "Email us". Scan it with your own phone before printing. Free, no account.
The mailto: format, written correctly
Inside the pattern is a mailto: link β the same standard behind every clickable email address on the web. It's worth knowing the real syntax, because there are broken versions circulating, including in some very prominent places:
mailto:you@domain.com
mailto:you@domain.com?subject=Support%20request
mailto:you@domain.com?subject=Support%20request&body=Describe%20the%20issue%3AThe rules, all four of them:
mailto:then the address, nothing between them. You may run into variants written likemailto:you@://domain.com. That's not valid β there's no://in a mailto link, and a code built that way won't open anything useful.- First parameter after
?, the rest after&. Subject first, body second, by convention. - Spaces become
%20. So do line breaks (%0A) and colons (%3A). The generator above handles all of it; this matters only if you're writing the string by hand. - Keep it short. A long body makes a denser pattern, and a denser pattern is harder to scan from a distance or in poor light. Two lines of prompt, not two paragraphs.
What we encode: address, subject, body. What we don't: CC and BCC. Some generators offer them; ours doesn't, and we'd rather say so than let you find out after printing.
Before you print an address on something public
The address sits inside the code in plain text. Anyone who scans it has it, and anyone who photographs the poster can decode it later, at leisure, in bulk. A QR code offers exactly as much protection from harvesting as printing the address in large type, which is to say none.
Use a service address you can filter, rotate or retire: support@, contact@, orders@. Keep personal addresses for codes that stay on private material β a business card you hand over, an internal document, a letter.
Two different things get called an "email QR code"
- A code that opens an email to you. Someone scans, their mail app opens, your address is already there. That's this page.
- A QR code placed inside an email you send. A newsletter with a code in it. That's a different idea, and often a bad one: your reader is already holding the device. They can simply tap a link. A QR inside an email earns its place only when the message is meant to jump screens β an email that gets printed, shown on a shared display, or read on a desktop while the action happens on a phone. Otherwise you're asking someone to scan their own screen with their own phone, which is as awkward as it sounds.
Where an email code earns its place
Support on equipment. A code on the machine, the printer, the lift, the coffee grinder, with the serial number in the subject line. The person reporting the fault doesn't know what the machine is called. Your code does.
Trade shows and stands. "Scan to request a quote", subject pre-set to the event name. Come Monday, you know which lead came from which show without asking anyone.
Property, rentals and holiday lets. Guest questions, maintenance reports, check-out notes, each with its own subject and its own destination.
Reception desks and waiting areas. A quiet alternative for people who don't want to speak to anyone, which is more people than most businesses assume.
Print media and packaging. Any place where you'd otherwise print an address people have to retype, and mistype.
Job ads and recruitment. Scan to apply, subject pre-filled with the role reference. Applications sort themselves into folders.
Schools, clubs and associations. Absence notices, sign-ups, volunteer offers. Small organisations run on email and rarely have software to route it; a subject line is their router.
Feedback and complaints. A pre-written opening line takes the awkwardness out of starting. "I'd like to tell you about my visit onβ¦" gets you a real message instead of silence.
This code has no scan counter, and here's the honest version
Every URL-based code on this site has a dynamic twin that counts scans and lets you change the destination. The email type doesn't.
Your address, subject and message live inside the pattern. That's what makes the scan instant, and what makes the code work forever without an account. Counting scans would mean routing through our servers first β a hop between a poster and a mail app, and a dependency you don't need.
And with email, the trade barely stings:
- Your results arrive in your inbox. Every scan that converts becomes a message you can count. Better still, a distinct subject line per placement gives you attribution that a scan counter never could: not "how many people scanned", but "how many people actually wrote in, from where".
- The free download is the finished product. Nothing to renew, nothing that breaks.
- What an account adds: vector files (SVG, EPS) for print shops, and a dashboard when you're running a code per machine, per site or per event.
Design and print
- Say what happens. "Email us about this machine" beats "Scan me". A mail app opening unannounced makes people close it.
- Print the address too. It rescues anyone whose camera won't cooperate, and it reassures the cautious.
- Print specs. 2 Γ 2 cm minimum in the hand; roughly a tenth of the reading distance for a poster or a stand. Dark pattern, light background, matte finish.
- Vector files for real printing. Equipment labels, signage and packaging go through a print shop, and print shops want SVG or EPS. An account exports both.
Test it on two phones before the print run
This is the step everyone skips and everyone regrets. A mailto: code hands over to whatever mail app the phone has been told to use, and that varies more than you'd think.
- Scan it on an iPhone and on an Android. Check that the address, the subject and the first line all arrive intact, accents included. Subject lines with apostrophes and accented characters are where encoding mistakes show up.
- Try it on a phone that isn't yours. Yours has your mail app configured and your habits. A phone with no mail account set up will behave differently, and some of your audience is that phone.
- Remember webmail-only people. Someone who reads mail only in a browser on a laptop may get an empty prompt or nothing at all when the code is scanned on a desktop. That's normal, and it's a reason to print the address alongside the code.
- Scan it at the size you'll print it, on the material you'll print it on, under the light it will live in. A code that works on a screen can fail on satin paper under a spotlight.
It doesn't work? Quick checklist
- Nothing happens on a computer. A desktop with no mail client configured has nowhere to send the request. Normal, not a broken code.
- The mail opens but the subject is missing. The parameters were malformed β a missing
?, an&where a?belonged, or unencoded spaces. Regenerate from the form above. - The body is truncated. It was too long. Shorten it; you'll also get a cleaner code.
- It opens the wrong app. The phone uses whatever is set as the default mail app. Nothing to fix on your side.
- It won't scan. Too small, too glossy, too dense. Bigger, matte, shorter content, and vector files for anything printed professionally.
QR code generator β FAQ
What is an email QR code?
How do I create one?
What's the correct mailto format?
mailto:you@domain.com?subject=Your%20subject&body=Your%20message. The first parameter follows a ?, the rest follow &, and spaces are written %20. You'll see broken variants with :// in them β those aren't valid mailto links.