Easy Web Design: Linking: E-Mail Addresses

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You can link to any Internet service that has a “protocol” abbreviation for URLs. A URL is a Universal Resource Locator. It can link to any resource that can be linked to. The web protocol abbreviation is “http”. If you ever have to link to a gopher site, you’ll use “gopher://hostname/path”, and similarly for ftp sites. You almost never see those nowadays, but you do still occasionally see e-mail address links. The protocol name for an e-mail URL is “mailto”. E-mail addresses do not require a hostname (they use your local service provider’s outgoing mail provider automatically). The form of an e-mail URL is “mailto:address”. If your e-mail address is fflintstone@example.com, your e-mail URL is “mailto:fflintstone@example.com”. There are no spaces in URLs ever, so don’t put a space in “mailto” or anywhere else in the URL.

In general, you probably want to avoid putting e-mail addresses on your web site. Spammers harvest e-mail addresses from web pages and then send spam to the address. Many service providers will have special comment form CGIs (they should have instructions on how to set it up) that can take comments without your having to make your e-mail address public.

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