Be very wary of mailto tags as sites get spidered by email harvesters. I know because I was naive enough to try unprotected mailto tags, way back in 1997, when I setup my original personal home pages putting up all our family email ids including a joke one for my dog on his page.
Three months later he was the first one in the family to get a junk email and it was from a pet company trying to sell him an aquarium !
Gradually the volume of junk emails built up.
So I tried putting %20 (which resolves to a blank) in front and behind our email-ids, and then we started getting emails addressed to 20username@abc.my-isp-for-testing.co.uk etc.,
(domain name invented to prevent this plain text id being used !)
so I knew these were originating from mail harvesters that did not understand that %20 was an escape sequence for a blank.
If you do really want to use the mailto tag then one possible solution is wrap it up in Javascript such as the following example
| Put the following in your head statement <script language="JavaScript" > function InsertMailToTag( userName, domainName) { var EmailId; var atSign = "@" var fullStop = "."; EmailId = userName; EmailId = "" + EmailId + atSign; EmailId = EmailId + domainName; document.write( "<a href='mail" + "to:" + EmailId + "'>" + EmailId +"</A>" ); } </script> and put the following in your HTML instead of a mailto tag <script language="JavaScript" > InsertMailToTag("John.Smith", "ourowndomain.com"); </script>
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So there is no explicit mailto or @ sign in this code so a straight text scan would not find any give-away indications.
This is not perfect but will probably stop most email address harvesters from grabbing email-ids.
The above technique assumes that people visiting your site will have Javascript enabled but it is rare for people to have a browser that does not have Javascript enabled.