how to "email article to a friend"

I'm a newbie and have only worked with php to send email from webform input. I now want to add a new feature to my website: "Email article to a friend" and I don't know where to start. I want to add this feature to webpages that are dynamically created from a mysql database. How do I pull this same info. and send it in an email? I'm desperately looking for help at the absolute basic level. I'm not even clear on how I would "grab" the current url from which I want to email. Please respond to my email directly as I'm on the digest version. I'll print a summary and post to the list afterwards. Thank you, Shawna