I'm working on an application in which users can prepopulate an email with email address of people selected. This can end up on the level of hundreds of email addresses, which makes a massive mailto: link (well past 2000 characters). Ideally, the user would click a button, which would point to this mailto: link and then open outlook with all of these email addresses, and this will work for smaller numbers of users.
I discovered there was a problem with doing this from IE where it would hit the maximum URL length of 2048 characters (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427).
Is there some sort of way to bypass this limitation in javascript while still using IE such that it will not open more than one email window or require the user to do any "additional" work in sending the email? Ideally we would still like it to be the same as before, where it will just prepopulate the email in Outlook, but we are also considering writing our own full email system
No, there isn't.
You would be better off using a server-side script to send off the emails, as there will be no limitation this way and the email addresses can remain private if needed.