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Re: Hiding mailto: links

for

From: Jared Smith
Date: Feb 27, 2007 8:10AM

On 2/27/07, Emma Duke-Williams < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Do you have some stats on this, Jared?

Nope. Just my own observations that many people are now using
web-based mail solutions (Exchange, GMail, Yahoo, etc.) rather than
installed clients (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.). I did find this small
study that showed 64% used web-based e-mail -
http://www.lyris.com/news/pr/pr-111705.html

Does anybody else have additional stats?

> However, it is a useful point, as I can review what I tell my students
> now! (I used to tell them to avoid mailto: links primarily because of
> the problems of spam - though I did tell them there was a chance that
> mailto doesn't work. I'll emphasise more the Mailto probably won't
> work anyway).

It's not that it won't work - it just is likely to be problematic for
the end user. Many users of web-based have learned to find and copy
the e-mail address. There are a few apps that will allow the mailto
links to work with web-based mail (GTalk and GMail notifier on Firefox
come to mind). The best solution to all of this is well designed
contact forms, though some will argue that users are less likely to
use them than to send an e-mail.

Jared