The Problem with Mailto:
As anyone who’s spent much time surfing the internet can probably tell you, a mailto: link is the kind that usually launches a user’s email client and has some information — at minimum an address, but subjects aren’t uncommon — already filled in.
It sounds benign enough, but I don’t like it. There are three essential problems with using mailto: links on today’s internet. The first is a problems for the publisher, the second is a problem for users like me, and the third is a problem for all users. Add those all up, and I’m rather certain that mailto: links should be used as little as possible.
The most obvious and well known problem is the one posed to the publisher. That is: for nearly as long as there have been spammers on the internet, they’ve built bots those go around and scrape information from mailto: links. With this information, they do what any sensible spammer will, send you offers to enlarge your penis, get rich quick, win the lottery, and — if you’re really lucky — sign up for totally disgusting forms of pornography.
No one wants this stuff, and so schemes have been imagined to combat the problem. Some are rather low-tech, like creating a broken mailto: link like “mailto:me[at]me[dot]com.” This can work, if the sender recognizes that you’ve broken the link and they need to fix it. A myriad of other, more complex, options exist and yet none of them offer much compelling reason for not abandoning the format altogether.
But honestly, I don’t really care about the problems a publisher has when they use mailto: links, I have a problem with the inconveniences they cause me.
The first of which, and admittedly a not completely common one, is that I use Gmail as my primary email client. As such, when I (inadvertently) click a mailto: link the computer launches the default email client which I’ve never used nor configured. This means that I get a useless program launch that lets me compose an unsendable email.
There are work around for this, of course. One of the more elegant is offered for the forthcoming — but already widely used — Firefox 3. Gina Trapani explains how a few mildly technical steps can make the browser launch Gmail for mailto: link. But this isn’t something that the average user of a web-based email client is likely to know about or do, so it hardly solves this problem for those who want to use the mailto: link.
The last gripe was already touched on, but has broader implications than I earlier suggested. I can think of few things worse than navigating around a site and inadvertently launching another program — whether or not I regularly use that program.
This is usually a result of poor design, but not always. To my mind, the greatest sin is when a site puts a mailto: link in main navigation controls. This wasn’t too abnormal a decade ago, but mercifully convention now say that such a link should never launch an external program without warning. Some have yet to get that memo about conventions, however.
Though I personally dislike curmudgeonly exhortation from anyone, including myself, sometimes it just feels necessary. Mailto: links are a poor invention when they work perfectly, and a hideous invention when they don’t work properly.
Personally I’m a fan of contact forms — like the one I use. There are a lot of plugins that make it easy to build one for WordPress, the most noted of which is cforms II. If that’s too much, you can also simply create a separate page that says Contact, and offers an email address there. Or you could simply make explicitly clear that your email address is behind a mailto: link. I’d certainly prefer seeing the inelegant “Contact Me (mailto:)” to the deceptive “Contact Me.”
Of course as just a random internet crumudgeon, there’s little reason for you to follow my advice. I accept that. But don’t tell me I didn’t warn you when you receive an angry email from a crumudgeon like me.