mailto
One of the first things I learned when I started learning HTML was how to link one page to another by using the <a> tag. For example <a href=“http://google.com”>Google</a> links the text “Google” to http://google.com. Another piece of code you could add to the <a> tag was “mailto” which would make the link open up a window in your email client (like Outlook, Thunderbird etc) so that you could start typing an email.
But I have to wonder: with the majority of people nowadays using webmail based email applications (like Gmail, Hotmail etc) instead of applications like Outlook, is the mailto tag a thing of the past? Also remember that spambots can pick up email addresses that are embedded in the mailto tags making it another reason why most people don’t use mailto tags anymore.
But if the mailto tag is in the past, what is the future?
2 comments so far
mailto is not in the past! Just set webmail as “mailto handler” in your web browser and it will work
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Firefox can do this using simple UI, Opera using a little workaround, but it does work
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by Livio - Nov 9, 2008Many people use a web-form and underlying server code to post “mail” and comments to sites.
Much like this one?
by Graham Street - Nov 25, 2008