Whilst the Internet has matured at a startling pace in only a few years there is still one part that hasn’t changed a bit, and is still going strong on many web pages across the Web today, and that is the “MailTo” link. For those that are still unsure of what a MailTo link is here is a code example below:

<a href="mailto:user@email.org" title="This is a MailTo Link!" />

The entire point of a MailTo link was to provide a means for a user to send an email to the enclosed address by opening up the users desktop email client, ready to send an email to the right address. By digging around the W3C website you can find details on the origins of the MailTo link and its uses.

Whilst back then it seemed a good idea to be able to do this nowadays the Contact Form has taken over. For a while Web Designers and Developers have been using forms to allow users to send information and messages to their email addresses, and for the majority it seems like the best way for many reasons. With a contact form spam becomes less of an issue and the owner gets to direct information in the way he/she wishes (i.e. providing required fields).

For the past few years the preferred method of sending an email is not through a desktop email client but through a provided online email client. Whilst ISP’s are still giving out email addresses to many many of us seem to prefer using online clients to access our emails from wherever we want, instead of having them downloaded to our computers where they risk corruption.

The problem many of us are facing is the fact that these links will not pick up our favourite online email application, but will try to send to a default desktop client (commonly Outlook). Google has bridged one gap with their Google Toolbar by allowing MailTo links to direct to the users’ Gmail accounts, but there is still no universal method of dealing with this. There are some registry hacks available but these can be very dangerous and are strongly not recommended for your average person to carry out.

It’s a shame that no one has tried to bridge this blatant gap between desktop and web yet. With luck the browser creators will look at this flaw and try to come to some kind of solution.