I spent some time searching for an answer to this question today but came up empty-handed - kind of surprised this info is so hard to find. mailto: links by default launch desktop email clients. So when a user signs up with a webmail system like GMail/Hotmail/Yahoo, every mailto: link on the web now launches a desktop app that the user no longer uses.
Pro-active users can install a plugin/extension that will fix this, so that mailto: links connect to their preferred webmail system. Less technical users will never do this, and will now consider mailto: links basically unusable.
The question is this: What percentage of all webmail users have configured their systems (or had them configured) to properly intercept and handle mailto: links?
Background: In the endless debate over whether it’s better to use contact forms or mailto: links (both sides have pros and cons), it seems crucial to know the numbers. If mailto: links are broken for most webmail users, then contact forms are the clear answer.
Do any webmail systems help or prompt the user to configure mailto: handling correctly? Or is everyone left to figure it out for themselves?
Not at all. mailto: is a perfectly legal link protocol, and all operating systems/browsers recognize them. It’s just that for many/most webmail users, the OS is not configured to pass the request to the preferred webmail system. The question here is what percentage of users are in this situation?
Yes a legal protocol but one you can’t use in web pages unless you want the email account flooded with spam to the point where the account itself becomes unusable.
Right - there are spam-prevention reasons to eschew the mailto: protocol, but 1) These can be mitigated through the use of javascript obfuscation techniques that block spam harvesters, and 2) Modern mail systems like GMail do such an amazing job at spam control that you don’t even feel it. There’s a school of thought that says people like to use real email so much over contact forms that the spam risk is worth it - let GMail sort out the spam.
I’m not taking a side in this - again, there are a lot of good reasons to go with either approach. I’m just curious about whether anyone has seen numbers (I can’t find them!)
So I’m inferring here that you’re definitely on the side of contact forms over mailto: links? I don’t disagree with you! But from doing informal office interviews, it seems a lot of people disagree vehemently.
I’ve heard some users describe this as “the mail fail” … and they dread it (these are webmail users for whom maiilto: config is still linked to the old desktop mail client).