a cup of ruby java

How often do you still see HTML codes like this?

<a href="mailto:somebody@server.com">Email me!</a>

When you click onto this link, a mail client, such as Outlook Express (default on Windows XP) will automatically pop up to help you draft the email.

It is useful in the following scenarios:

• Your workplace computer uses Outlook or other mail clients
• You use a mail client for handling your mail

However, with the popularity of Web based email services increasing, is the mailto: link starting to be deprecated? I am sure most of us have used GMail, Hotmail or Yahoo mail before. There is no way to click the mailto: link and have your web based mail automatically start composing mail for you. If it does, think of the security risk!

Besides, there are many email harvesting bots out there that looks out for mailto: links and adds it to their spam list. Even social sites like Facebook generates an Image with not alt text to display your email so that bots can’t harvest it (OCR is out of topic here).

I particularly refrain from clicking mailto: links because I do not use a mail client. The ease of use for web based mail clients makes it hard for me to justify using Outlook or Thunderbird at home when I can simply open a new tab in my Firefox and browse to GMail.

mailto: links still have their uses, no doubt. But against the growing trend of having more and more services shifting online and spam email harvesters, it is hard to see any use for them other than in corporate environments.