Why is Using MAILTO Incompetent?
First, before I offend anyone out there one of my pet hates is the mailto link. You know the mailto lazy people use to send forms with action="mailto:spud@cods.com". Its also the text link you see even on ‘professional work’ which automagically opens up your email client. You’ll see it on sites for restaurants, real estate agents and even web developer’s own company sites. But its wrong and it sucks and here’s why (again).
There’s a great article over on Isolani called The Mythical Mailto which might be worth a read (I link to it yet again as a reference). Then sit down and think about what the laziness of using mailto for your contact is costing you – or your client.
Why not just program a mobile phone to only ring 24 times out of 25?
If you’ve read the Isolani article then you’ll see that using mailto leaves the action entirely up to the browser. You have no control over what browser the user has so they could get any response from a successful email (Windows Explorer gets a tick there) to any number of errors for having an unconfigured email client, no email client, or just a browser which doesn’t handle mailto at all.
Listen closely – why is it any better to use mailto on text links on your page?
Now I can understand the novice who hears this and kind of thinks so what it works doesn’t it. And I have sympathy for someone who doesn’t know of any alternative server side method to achieve a superior result. But seriously don’t some of the web developers out there care about the crappiness of using mailto? Seriously? If there is one overly abundant abuse of markup in the world it has to be the malignant little mailto – the melanoma of markup.
Inaccessible piece of shit it is.
I call upon anyone who at all considers themselves to be a web professional to implement decent server side contact for their clients (and themselves). And if you’re in the business of doing the quick and shifty mailto here and there – pull your friggen socks up.
MAILTO SUCKS. I mean it really sucks. And I discovered this how?
A few years ago I had the ignoble experience of standing in front a computer whose email client had not been configured correctly. I wrote for 20 minutes in my bathrobe about god knows what and then submitted. Guess what? Yep lost the lot and didn’t ever contact that organisation again. Then I noticed clients occasionally rang complaining about their mailto contact link not working for a friend or they had customer complaints.
MAILTO SUCKS. Admit it and move on. You can’t rely on the user’s platform to deal with it and the solution – server side processing – is cut and paste kiddie script. Too easy.
Can I stop kicking this melanoma of markup now?
