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Email links on web sites

I’ve recently been noticing quite a few sites that are no longer using mailto: links to allow people to email them with a single click, like it has always been. The obvious reason for this is the insane amount of spam that can be generated by a single Mailto: link on a site that has been spidered by one of the email harvesting bots that spammers send out.

Some of them have just been putting the email address in the HTML without actually making it a link, like this:

john@somesite.com

Others take it a step further, and don’t even use the “@” sign, which means you have to not only copy/paste their address into your email app, but then you have to add the @ sign yourself. They’ll usually put something like this on the page instead of the @ sign:

john{AT}somesite.com or john(at)somesite.com

This prevents the spambots from harvesting the address, but it also seems like a big pain for the person that wants to email the owner of the site. Normally this doesn’t bother me at all if it is on a messageboard or some other site like that, but I’ve been seeing it on some commercial sites recently, and even on some sites by people that are normally all about usability and accessibility on their sites.

Is it just my imagination that this technique is really less usable, or are these people sacrificing usability just to save themselves the trouble of deleting a few (hundred) emails? It almost seems hypocritical to me… These people can preach usability from the rooftops, until it inconveniences them by opening up their email address to the possibility of spammers. Now I’m not naming names and don’t mean to say that it is wrong to do this, I’m just really wondering if this is becoming the new norm or if it is just happening on a few sites. I did a quick search on Google and found that even “Mr. Usability Guru Himself”, Jakob Nielsen does not use a mailto: link on his web site. He even admits that it is a “sub-optimal design” but then says that he omits the mailto: link anyway basically because he doesn’t want to get any spam. And he also basically implies that unless you will go to the trouble of copy/pasting his email address, he doesn’t want to hear from you in the first place because he already “gets several hundred email messages per day”. Again, this really just makes it look to me like once usability inconveniences the “usability guru”, he suddenly doesn’t care about it anymore or makes up some half-assed excuse as to why he goes with the less-usable method.

This could especially be a problem with new web users. I still talk to a lot of people that ask if my email address starts with “www.” when I give my email address to them over the phone. Or they will start their own email address with “www.” (and normally when this happens, their address also ends with aol.com). Obviously these people are having a hard enough time learning what the “@” sign is in the first place, let alone knowing that {AT} means to delete the two letters between the curly braces, and then replace it with the @ sign. Hell a lot of people don’t even know how to copy/paste. So you can bet that a lot of people will be trying to send an email directly to john{at}somesite.com which will of course bounce back or not go out at all, totally frustrating the user and keeping them from emailing you. Even people that do know how to copy/paste and know to put in the @ sign may find this irritating. Most of the time I just won’t write the person/company if they do this. If they want my money/attention the least they could do is make it easy for me to contact them, not have to jump through hoops by copy/pasting and decyphering some email code just to make sure they don’t receive any offers to enlarge their penises.

There are several other options to allow people to still easily email you without opening up your inbox to spammers.

Use an HTML form
You could write an email contact form that sends you an email from your web site. This is good because spambots can’t harvest your address, and it allows people to contact you directly from your web site without having to launch their email app.

However, you can’t easily attach a file to the email (unless you set that up in the form), and the sender may want to add HTML or other email options like CC or BCC to the email as well, which wouldn’t be easy (again, unless you added all that to the form, which would likely make it too complicated to be useful).

Encode the Mailto: link
Use something like the Hivelogic Email Enkoder to encode your mailto: link in a piece of Javascript code. It works exactly like a Mailto: link in most browsers, but is just gibberish to harvest bots. However, if the visitor has Javascript disabled they won’t see the link and won’t be able to email you without copy/pasting and all of that business. But at least this method would make it easy for 95% of your audience to email you with a click. And if someone has a reason to turn Javascript off, they most likely also know how to copy/paste, which would mean they would probably realize that they had to use that method since they had chosen to disable Javascript.

Has anyone else noticed this? Is it bad? Is it just something that web users are going to have to deal with as Spam becomes an increasingly uncontrollable problem? Are there any other methods than the ones I’ve mentioned above to still provide an easy way for visitors to contact a site owner, without opening that site owner up to every spammer on the ‘net?

Is mailblocks down for you as well? Do you still use it? Have you any idea how I could find out what’s going on with the service? It’s been down for almost a day now.

This is a great topic and I you make good points in your discussion of the “new” e-mail link. I recently changed my e-mail address on my homepage to the {at} format because of the spam problem. I know that it might prevent e-mail from people newer to the web but I just couldn’t deal with all the spam anymore.

The form idea is a good one as well but I really appreciate the link to Hivelogic. That sounds like a great idea!

Always enjoy the blog,
Todd