A year or so ago I decided to stop using the mailto tag because many times it is annoying to the user. It will bring up an email program that the user may not be using at the time, which may also take time to load and may not be what the user wanted to do when he/she clicked on what looked like a link.
Instead I decided to just start displaying the email address without the mailto tag. I believe that both ways probably can produce spam.
My questions are these, Is the mailto tag the accepted way to setup email links, or do good people/companies avoid them? Second, if they both create spam, is there a way to prevent spam from being generated on either? I have seen the mailto being put inside comments somehow, but it seems kind of a hacked way of doing it.
You should use the mailto: URI scheme in both HTML4 and HTML5.
If the user doesn't want a mail client to load, he won't click the link.
Not using mailto: just makes it more annoying to send you email.
Any half-decent (indecent?) spam crawler will pick up email addresses whether or not they're in mailto:.
One effective way to prevent this is to include a (trivially-)encrypted version of the email address in Javascript and write it into the document.
This way, any spam crawlers that do not execute Javascript won't get your address.
If you're afraid of spam crawlers that do use Javascript, you can only write the email address on mousemove and/or after 5 seconds.
For accesibility reasons, and for humans with Javascript disabled, you may want to include a scrambled form of the address in plain text. (eg, SLaks (SHIFT+2) MyDomain (period) com)
You can write a server-side script to generate this automatically for an email address.
For obvious reasons, I won't share code. (In order for this to work well, each site should have a different implementation)
I usually see companies using a server-processed contact form instead of publishing email addresses. Most web geeks I know tend to use some sort of JavaScript obfuscation to write out their email addresses, which will admittedly leave non-JS browsers/users in the dust. A compromise would be to use images. (Yuck.)
To get to the heart of your question, I absolutely use mailto: all the time where appropriate. It is a meaningful way to convey to a browser what to do with a link. Users are free to configure what email client to open these links in using the relevant browser and/or OS options.
I recommend only using the mailto protocol when the displayed text is an email address; otherwise, the user may not understand that he is clicking on a mailto link.
As far as spam, if you put an email address in your HTML, it's susceptible to spam. You could use JavaScript to dynamically insert email addresses into the DOM, but users without JavaScript won't be able to see the email address.
My perception is that the use of mailto is not related to HTML5 or any other markup spec, but a matter of personal/company coding convention. If you choose to deprecate the protocol, then that's fine, but it will not make any notable difference to spam.
It might be useful to do some A/B testing to replace the mailto with a contact form and see the difference in response rates...
Related
Really simple here but i am trying to generate a link within an email that popups a page but its not working it also is througing a security exception in outlook 365 how does one properly open a popup from email with correct height and width of window.
here
Using scripts is totally unsupported in emails.
"Scripting in Emails
The short answer is that scripting is unsupported in emails. This is hardly surprising, given the obvious security risks involved with a script running inside an application that has all that personal information stored in it.
Webmail clients are mostly running the interface in JavaScript and are not keen on your email interfering with that, and desktop client filters often consider JavaScript to be an indicator of spam or phishing emails.
Even in the cases where it might run, there really is little benefit to scripting in emails. Keep your emails as straight HTML and CSS, and avoid the hassle."
Source: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/dev-resources/guides/coding/
You can use target="_blank" instead.
You have to use the a tag this way:
Open page in new window
Hope it helps.
In the footer of my website I have this e-mail adress that goes to info#mydomain. I want to know if it's possible for me to disallow bad/good robots to index this adress?
Thank you
It's not. If it's on the internet, they can get it.
I don't think so. If the page is allowed to be indexable, the email will be gobbled up too.
However, you could take steps to make sure the bots don't see it. If it's not essential that they see it immediately you could use a CAPTCHA to protect it
Or you could simply use the image of the text representation.
You could also go the JS route to hiding it. Basically allow the email to be seen via with only JS
This is not a feature of robots.txt, its intended feature is to stop Google from crawling certain paths. You can instead block emails in this sort of way (the easy way):
webmaster (at) website (dot) com
It's still visible to a human, but blocks some spam / search / crawlers / bots from using it. The best way really is to use gd2 to make a small image with a string of the email, and show that. A human can read it and write it down in their mail program, but a bot generally should not. You will still have some bots that can.
First, why (historically) was conversion tracking implemented by html pixel tracking versus using other small and able-to-be-made-nearly-invisible html elements which could provide the same information? Curious why html images were used as opposed to other methods.
Second, many email clients, e.g. Outlook and Gmail don't display images in html emails by default as a means to "protect your identity". Why do images provide greater exposure of information than the other markup elements in the page? They all show up in some server's web log as a GET from some IP address with some possible query string parms, so I'm not sure why images represent additional risk.
versus using other small and able-to-be-made-nearly-invisible html elements which could provide the same information?
Name one! I can't think of one except images, at least not in good old HTML 4, which still is the standard for rich E-Mail until this day. External style sheets would be a possibility nowadays, but don't get loaded in E-Mails. Background images could be disabled. iframes came later.
They all show up in some server's web log as a GET from some IP address with some possible query string parms, so I'm not sure why images represent additional risk.
When an image resource is embedded into an E-Mail, the time when that image is loaded is the time when the user reads the E-Mail. Plus, the IP the image is pulled from is the IP the recipient is logged on to the Internet with at that moment. A badly patched Windows installation might be enough to facilitate an attack with this.
From the request, it is also maybe possible to determine the recipient's operating system, whether they're behind a Firewall / router, which Internet provider they're with, where roughly they are located.... All already very, very sensitive information.
When you load an image from a site, you make a request to that sites http server. The request contains header information which is pretty extensive.
Images were there from the first HTML spec, which explains their common usage. <iframe>, <object>, <script> and all the other embeddable elements came in later editions and were not always supported or enabled in the browser.
Displaying images in HTML Emails can be seen as a "security risk" as confirmation for spammers that somebody actually reads their spam mails.
As the question states: Mailto is useful enough for people who use a desktop email client. That number is, I'm thinking, going down all the time outside of corporate intranets. Thus making mailto links an annoyance for these people, as they have to close whatever the default mail client is on their system and copy-paste the link.
Now, I know that there's plugins to bridge the issue, but let's face it - most people probably don't use them. Is using mailto rude or unthinking these days? I say yes, what say ye?
I personally think they're still relevant, since I still use a desktop email client. What alternatives to a mailto link exist? Printing the email address sans an actual <a> tag is annoying, because then visitors have to copy-paste the email address; and using a form to submit a message is annoying because then there's no record of a sent email.
If a visitor without a configured desktop email client is really concerned about mailto links, he can always install a plugin to handle mailto links with his webmail client.
If you use the Google Toolbar, you can have mailto: links go to gmail.
So, no... mailto: links are still relevant.
I'll be the dissenting view here. Mailto links annoy the hell out of me when the email is not also printed on the webpage, or when it isn't clear that it is an email link. For example, a link marked "feedback" could just as well lead to a web form. I browse a lot on machines other than my own, and I don't appreciate having to wait ~10 seconds for Outlook to start up, just so I can click No a bunch of times, then go back to my browser.
So mailto links are fine, but please label them clearly.
Mailto is relevant. As with all HTML, it's up to the client's web browser to interpret the meaning. Which implies that it is possible for a web browser to forward the request to a web mail solution.
It's unlikely for that work, as that most web mail services do not follow a standard way of doing things. However, there are a lot of mail clients that are used, and I find it nice to have a mailto link. Also, firefox allows for the user to copy just the email address.
Mailto links are still the standard way to do things. Your alternative is to just put the email on a page in plain text, which is strictly less usable, since now nobody can click on it.
If you really want to do something useful, you could use javascript to add a little drop down menu that appears on hover that has links to several popular webmail's "compose" options. However, I haven't seen that done anywhere and so might be awkward for users.
Browsers are building in support for webmail. I'm using Firefox 3.5 and it gives me a choice of Gmail, Yahoo mail, or "use other" (in addition to Thunderbird).
I'm not sure what's the problem? Use a mailto link for those who want it, and have the link text display the address. Those who use webmail (or want to copy it for whatever purprose) can then just highlight it and copy.
It's a standard. Why throw away a standard just because some people don't use it? Browsers like Google Chrome have a "Copy E-mail Address" option on the right-click menu so people without a desktop client can easily get the address into their webmail application.
These days, I don't think people post their email addresses as text, anyway. Or they shouldn't, at least. It's way too easy for spam bots to grab them that way. I always try to place mine in an image or something.
The bottom line is, it's kind of a non-issue.
Gmail can be used to link mailto - so, webmail is not an issue, if it is well written ;)
Take a loot at this, for instance. And as said in another post, Google Toolbar offers this out of the box.
Its either close the default mail client or copy-and-paste the mailto address. What we really need is for OS vendors to make it so we can set up a webmail address as our default mail client. Though there are security issues to consider with that of course.
Any additional semantic meaning you can add to content is a good thing. Mailto differentiates an email address where a user needs to take immediate action on, from a regular address that can wait to have action taken.
Mailto is a wonderful thing. I want your email address to open in my client, not a browser window.
I have seen some mails which has HTML content embedded in them. The content of the mail changes as the corresponding webpage in their site change(for example price of stocks which keeps updating in the mail itself). How to link such webpage content into emails?
In other words how to link a web page into an email so that whenever I change the html page, the mail content also changes.
Thanks...
A thought: maybe they are using an image that is downloaded from the server?
As you can't have JavaScript in an email or even most CSS, I'm guessing this might be one of the only ways. I'm pretty sure that one email client or service removes every piece of "special" HTML: iframes, JavaScript, CSS, Flash, etc.
You could place an image in your HTML - which was updated by you on your server.
This may be impossible due to security limitations, but you may be able to use an iframe element.
Not a solution, but a quick answer from my site on this topic as a user: Beside the point that Javascript/Image/IFrame/Flash solutions doesn't reliable work in all email clients, but are a general security risk, I dislike the basic idea of changing the looks of an email after you have send it without the receivers approval. Additionally you make it very easy for the user to be tracked (working hours, locations, view) and that is definitely NOT in the interest of the users. If you have something important or interesting to tell just provide a link to your site plus a short description...