Why Our Email Address is not a Link

Posted 05/19/2005

We receive many emails that read something like this:

I have noticed that your email address on this web site is not a mailto: link, so I had to manually copy and paste your address in order to send you this email.

Here is why we do not use hyperlinks to automatically launch your email program into drafting an email.

Yes, we are aware that our email addresses are not hyperlinked.
We also realize that this means that people have to spend an extra ten seconds to type the address if they want to send us email.
We do know that this reduces usability of our site.

The reason for this sub-optimal design is that we get several email messages per day. Thus, we prefer to filter our email to only hear from those people who have something sufficiently important to say that they are willing to invest the extra ten seconds. In fact, we encourage you to email us.

There is a second reason that is even more important: Any hyperlinked email address is vulnerable to automated programs that download entire websites in order to find email addresses to add to SPAM mailing lists. We like to avoid as much SPAM as possible.

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