Poor designers choose to user the Mailto function

I was designing websites when the Mailto: option started appearing. For the people that were doing simple sites, it provided a way to let the user send mail. Unfortunately the spammers started using web crawlers to search for Email addresses. Today, web designers that continue to use this are either (1) forced to do it by their client (2) can only use simple drag and drop tools (3) are either clueless or lazy. Creating a form and processing the request on the server is both safer and allows you to send the information to many different addresses. It also has the advantage of hiding the Email address from the spammers. There is no excuse for continuing to use a Mailto:. You can easily get a copy of a number of form processing programs that can be easily modified to fit you needs. When I pointed out to one IT manage that using this option increased the amount of spam, he replied that they used an email filtering program. He was not bothered by the fact that he had to use an expensive solution, which requires continuous updates, to solve a simple and easy problem. I believe in using a good design, not wrapping a bad design with more software.



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