Mark E. Buckley

Reducing Mail

If you own a web site you are bound to get unwanted mail a.k.a. spam. One way to reduce the amount you receive is to eliminate your mailto links.

When inserting your email address on your web site, it is normal in the anchor tag to put an href or hypertext reference attribute. This attribute allows someone to click on your email address and send you an email.

This is a great convenience to your visitors but it is not great for you. The bad people out there run some sort of program that finds every href attribute with a value of 'mailto.' I recently removed all my live email links from my web pages. I have seen other sites do the same.

So you need to decide between convenience for your visitors and inconvenience for yourself. Although it would be nice for your customers to quickly email you, you probably won't have time to respond because your in box is full of spam anyways.