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As the question states: Mailto is useful enough for people who use a desktop email client. That number is, I'm thinking, going down all the time outside of corporate intranets. Thus making mailto links an annoyance for these people, as they have to close whatever the default mail client is on their system and copy-paste the link.
Now, I know that there's plugins to bridge the issue, but let's face it - most people probably don't use them. Is using mailto rude or unthinking these days? I say yes, what say ye?
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Mailto HTML Links Explained. HTML is nearly as old as the internet, and so is one of its most common schemes: mailto. And, even though so many things have changed since then, good ol' mailto is still widely used and taught in HTML courses all around the world.
As long as you know that your receiver has a reliable mail client and you aren't worried about things like click-through metrics or tracking, mailto can be a preferred option. In some ways, mailto links are considered old-school.
Whether you display your email address on your site, or you put the email address in a mailto link – or both – making it visible is a bad idea. You're probably going to receive spam anyway, but you stand to receive a lot more spam if your email address can be picked up by bots that search the web for email addresses.
Mailto links are used to redirect the user to an email address instead of a link. When the user clicks on a mailto link, the default email client opens on the user's computer and suggests sending an email to the address included in the mailto link.
I personally think they're still relevant, since I still use a desktop email client. What alternatives to a mailto link exist? Printing the email address sans an actual <a> tag is annoying, because then visitors have to copy-paste the email address; and using a form to submit a message is annoying because then there's no record of a sent email.
If a visitor without a configured desktop email client is really concerned about mailto links, he can always install a plugin to handle mailto links with his webmail client.
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If you use the Google Toolbar, you can have mailto: links go to gmail.
So, no... mailto: links are still relevant.
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