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Why My Email Address is not a mailto: Link

I swear, I get a huge number of email messages that go somewhat like this:
I have noticed that your email address on the Useit home page is not a mailto: link, so I had to manually copy and paste your address in order to send you this email.

In fact, this is the most frequently asked question in my email. The sad thing is that many of these messages contain no other content except this question. So in the hope that I will get less email in the future, here is the answer:

The reason for this sub-optimal design is that I get several hundred email messages per day. Thus, I prefer to filter my email to only hear from those people who have something sufficiently important to say that they are willing to invest the extra ten seconds.

Email is somewhat unusual in having two users: the sender and the recipient. This means that a systemic approach to overall usability has to balance both users' needs.

There is a second reason that is even more important: Anything you put into a mailto: tag is fodder for EmailSyphon and other site suckers that download entire websites in order to find email addresses that they can add to spam mailing lists. I prefer hearing about as few get-rich-schemes and porn sites as possible.