Ironically, this blog uses the decried mailto: hrefs.... it includes them as a link in the name of the commenter! But, it "encode[s] to prevent extraction" (simply removing the @ and changing to _AT_.) This is actually not likely to fool a spider: they know this trick. What it does do is make the href link all the more useless. Why bother with it? As the article says.
@James- Readers using an email client instead of webmail doesn't help the harvesting issue. Because keeping email addresses inside hrefs doesn't fool spiders. Spiders read the HTML, not the text, and pick up email addresses "hidden" in mailto: just fine.
@JP- That's cool, but it doesn't address the problem that most people don't, and so using a mailto: href is just likely to confuse readers.
Comment
Ironically, this blog uses the decried mailto: hrefs.... it includes them as a link in the name of the commenter! But, it "encode[s] to prevent extraction" (simply removing the @ and changing to _AT_.) This is actually not likely to fool a spider: they know this trick. What it does do is make the href link all the more useless. Why bother with it? As the article says.
@James- Readers using an email client instead of webmail doesn't help the harvesting issue. Because keeping email addresses inside hrefs doesn't fool spiders. Spiders read the HTML, not the text, and pick up email addresses "hidden" in mailto: just fine.
@JP- That's cool, but it doesn't address the problem that most people don't, and so using a mailto: href is just likely to confuse readers.