email link not working

[starman]

Hi - hopefully this is a simple question, just HTML / PHP.
I have a php script that retrieves (among others) bare email addresses from a DB table (i.e., just in the form ' whatever.thing@ example.com') which are then displayed on a webpage. I would like these to be clickable links, so have the relevant line as:

echo "<b>Email: </b><a href='mailto:>" .$themail. "</a><br>";

Everything echoes properly, with the email address clickable. As a test, I retrieved my own email address.
However...when I mouseover this link, all that appears in the status bar is "mailto:" without an address. And clicking on the link sends the mail from me rather than to me!

[zorgi]

echo "<b>Email: </b><a href='mailto: ".$themail."'>" .$themail. "</a><br>";

[Atli]

Or better yet:

echo "<b>Email: </b><a href='mailto: $themail'>$themail</a><br>";

No point breaking out of a double-quoted string to add variables.

[zorgi]

Thanks for pointing that out Atli. Just a bad habit of mine since the times when I only used dreamweaver. Dreamweaver doesn't highlight variables within the string so variables look like string and are very hard to spot. Eclipse does much better job :)

[starman]

thanks you two! Worked first time, and I was also able to adapt the code so that web addresses were linked properly too.
Many thanks.