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Mailto @: = “SPAM IN MY INBOX”
You want people to contact you don’t you? Well of course you do. You want to plaster your email address all over your site in hope they will contact you “For All Their Real Estate Needs”. (Yes, that’s sarcasm).
But you want to make it easy for them so you make your email address click-able. So you or your “Webguy” use the HTML command mailto: to make the link click-able.
However, there are two things you should be aware of before you do this:
Spam bots crawl sites looking to harvest email addresses
They look for “mailto:” and harvest email addresses so they can begin sending you offers by the thousands to enhance certain body parts. Sell you drugs from Canada or invite you to “personal webcam chats” in Russia.
This is one of the reason we have contact forms that never display an email address, the contact come to you and you can respond accordingly.
Annoying as HELL
Well, it’s not as bad as HELL but it really is annoying when a website opens my email client so I can send them an email message. If you happen to be on a computer that isn’t yours and suddenly the email client is opened and you are viewing someone’s email messages. Even worse is when they don’t tell you the link is not to a site but instead mailto 
With all that said, I still have clients that want those email addresses displayed and click-able. Now there’s a nifty (yes, I said nifty) plugin that will encode the email address so Spam bots can’t read it and send you all those desirable offers.
Email Address Encoder
This plugin (Click Add New under plugins and search Email Address Encoder) is simple to use.
- Install the plugin
- Activate the plugin
That’s it, no settings or configuration.
Enter an email address in a page or post and then look at the page source. You won’t find mailto: or the email address, instead just a lot of sweet gibberish.
Now it doesn’t solve the Annoying issue (I really try to NOT piss off annoy my site visitors). But if you are still stuck in the 70′s & 80′s way of embedding your email address believing this is “The Way” to effective lead capture . . .
