I maintain a site that has several email links to send messages to various people. These are all coded as mailto links in XHTML. Users that are browsing through AOL have a problem not being able to send email because the mailto link tries to open Outlook Express. If the user always uses AOL to access their mail, they probably don't have Outlook Express configured and they receive an error message telling them that. Is there a way to accommodate AOL users with an alternative way to code email links instead of using mailto? Or does anyone know of a way to change some setting somewhere so AOL Mail is opened instead of Outlook Express for those users?

No. Keep the email address visible so they can copy it. Spam bots get it either it's visible on the page or in the source, so that doesn't make any difference.


Is AOL Mail a program? If so I guess they should be able to configure the browser to use it. If it's web mail you are out of luck.

I don't know enough about how AOL users retrieve their mail. I only hear back from them saying that they can't send email using the page links without going to Outlook Express. They don't use Outlook Express so they don't want to do that.

Well, mailto only works under certain premises.

I use Gmail, and I had to configure it to use Gmail by default.

Searching for a way to configure a browser to use AOL by default turned up this:
http://users.aol.com/bpabpabpa/aol.html

Unless you like spam, I would seriously recommend avoiding the 'mailto:' approach - this is just one of the terms email address harvesters search for in code. There are lots of ways of obfuscating email addresses (so they appear on-page to humans but are less visible to bots) but why not consider a form that sends you the email direct from the page?

Lots of ways to protect to form from spam too - captcha (if you're not concerned about accessibility); a simple maths question ... or my current favourite, an extra field which is hidden off-page that must be empty on submit. Bots will see it's there and in all likelihood inject text therefore catching them out!

There's a Firefox plug-in to solve CAPTCHAs, which is good news for accessibility, but bad news for webmasters trying to fight spam.

At this point, if you're big enough to be a significant target, then you need some other way to fight spam. If you aren't big enough to be a significant target, then the best anti-spambot test is something that not many other sites are using. If everyone starts using the same test to weed out spambots, then it becomes worth the spammers' time to defeat that test.