Email Message, Email Address and Clickability

One of the nicest features of email is that it is so easy to reply. All it requires is to press r or to press the reply button. This simplicity, I called it a feature, is rather the real essence of email.

When the email client has to decide where to send the reply it takes a look at the Reply-to: and then the From: header fields (possibly and if everything else fails also the Sender: header). It is not too far fetched to assume that the reply should go to where the original mail was coming from and in most cases this will be correct.

There may, however, be occasions when you want to assure that the reader responds to you but their email client may have a different address on its mind. This is not too uncommon with newsletters and other messages that (hopefully) are forwarded from one user to another, in which case the original From: header frequently is either lost or at least not easily usable. It has also been said that novice, inexperienced users may not know how to reply. I do not normally assume that people are stupid nor do I assume that software is, though in doubt (when I am concerned) I presume the latter.

Simple Copy & Paste

The most simple approach is to put your email address as it is into the message. This should look like so:

Please use me@example.com to reply.

In order to make use of this email address it has to be copied and pasted. I deliberately put the address in the middle of a sentence to avoid any punctuation marks that could interfere and produce invalid addresses like me@example.com. .

Better Copy & Paste

As we have just seen the simple text email address may evoke problems with surrounding characters. To avoid this it is common to delimit URLs and email addresses with < and >:

Contact me at <me@example.com>, please.

The greater than and less than signs are no problem because they are common (c'est la vie). This method also makes the email address stand out more prominently.

Simple Click & Mail

HTML allows "links" to email addresses. The "protocol" for such links is mailto. This, however, is not important. Important is that placing mailto: in front of your email address will make it clickable in many email clients. Such an address looks like this:

<mailto:me@example.com>

and all it takes to mail to it is to click on the link.

Better (?) Click & Mail

If you (and your recipient...) use an email client that understands HTM-enabled email (and most do) then you can of course use HTML to insert a link to your email address. The link, conforming to what we said above, would point to mailto:me@example.com.