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Email Links vs. web-based e-mail clients

Take a look at http://www.lunarpages.com/sales-questions/. Their “Send us your question” button is nice … but they really ought to list the email address on the page too. Clicking it will launch your default e-mail program, even if you don’t use one. For many people that means it will try to open Windows Mail, Outlook, or Thunderbird, even if they only use Gmail or Hotmail.

Not everyone uses Outlook, Thunderbird, etc (e-mail clients), and assuming that can cost you potential leads and business.

Someone who uses only web-based e-mail will want to be able to quickly copy and paste the e-mail address. Now, you can of course right-click and copy the link address, but then you still have to remove the “mailto:” part. Why put your visitors through so much unnecessary trouble if you really want them to contact you?

There are some valid concerns about attracting spam, but those can be mostly overcome using JavaScript cloaking. I think it would be preferable to receive some spam AND more e-mails from your site visitors, than it would be to receive less spam and fewer e-mails from your site visitors, but maybe it’s just me.