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Comment by leonardteo | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people already mentioned here the Home button. Anecdote: for years we kept getting users asking for a back to top button and we always told them to just use the Home button and they thought it was the most amazing thing ever. Most of our users are on Windows.

Anyway, we did end up having to put a Back to top button. It was clear that users just don’t get it. Most people really don’t know what the Home button does.

That, and you should never use the Mailto: link without writing the email as the text itself. Thanks to webmail, most users do not have their browsers configured to open mailto: so they complain that contact email links on their pages don’t work. Sigh....

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I don't know why this is "thanks to webmail". At least firefox can handle this perfectly fine.

That being said seeing the email is nice anyways in case you need to share it with someone or type it into your phone.

To clarify, all browsers CAN handle the mailto link as long as the user configures it to open the correct email client. That’s key because there’s many oblivious users who don’t even know about this setting (we know from the number of support requests we get from users angry that the contact link they created on their websites “don’t work”!). :)

Because of the prevalence of webmail like gmail (most of our users are on gmail) there’s many users who aren’t aware that it needs to be configured to open the said webmail page, so the mailto links does nothing. A “Contact me” or “contact support” mailto link won’t open anything, or it will open the default mail client like Mac Mail on Mac....On Windows in the past it would open outlook express lol. :)

I still don't see how webmail has anything to do with it. In fact opening Gmail prompts me to make it my default mail handler.

Users can fail to configure mailto links to point at their preferred email client irrespective of it being web-based or native. (Unless it is the default for the platform I guess)

> Users can fail to configure mailto links to point at their preferred email client irrespective of it being web-based or native. (Unless it is the default for the platform I guess)

That's more the issue. It's just misconfiguration and users who are oblivious to that setting. In the past, I don't believe that Gmail prompts you to make it your default handler, and from the number of support requests we received due to this issue, it's clear that a good number of users do not have their mailto handlers configured.

Cheers!

Also, many people have a work email account and a personal email account, and a mailto link doesn't give them the option to choose which account to send from - there's no reason not to write out email addresses as the text itself.

Many we don't use a mail client, so the mailto does not work because it's not configured :)

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