If you want to be contacted, I strongly recommend both options, with an email most important. (If you want to reduce contacts as part of your strategy, then go ahead an use a contact form only. This seems to be your plan and is ok for some sites.)

@rachel_levy: Copy your message and save a copy before submitting – yes, it’s a hassle but I have found it worthwhile for nontrivial contact form submissions. You’ve always heard you shouldn’t use a mailto link? Not from me, you’ll notice. Dubious advice.

Remember you can append ?subject=’custom subject’ to the email address in your mailto links to customize the subject. (People can change it of course.)

Use your own domain and set up custom email address for specific campaigns and uses. Close (or route to a catch-all address) when the it’s over.

Gmail users – remember to check your spam folder occasionally. There will probably be some email there that is not spam.

mailto link usability is a problem but not a good reason to not have an email address on your site. Indicate to the user it’s not a standard link or just include the address w/o the mailto (using some of the obscufication techniques noted above).

@rachel_levy – Sometime you will find a contact form which will let you send a copy to yourself so you know what you said on the contact form. Do you think this would eliminate some of the concerns you have without knowing what was said on the contact form as a record?

But, even knowing this, as someone filling out forms on a website, I know i don’t like it. I like to have a reminder of exactly what I said, when when I sent it. That’s lost with a contact form.

@Sangesh I’ve also heard that there are talented bots out there that are smart enough to read most of the cloaking methods that are practiced. No bot is smart enough to read an email address that is broken up into 2 or 3 separate images.

However, to reduce the likelihood of mailto link being harvested by spammers, there are a couple of easy tricks. Since email harvesting programs generally look for an “@” sign followed by something that looks like a domain name, robo@2dolphins.com is just the kind of juicy string harvesters love. A simple solution is an encoding substitution. Browsers can readily handle “%40″ instead of an “@” and a “%2e” instead of a “.” character. So, robo%402dolphins%2ecom is interpreted the same as robo@2dolphins.com. Although this isn’t foolproof, this has been pretty effective at preventing spammers from getting our email address from mailto links for several years.

This is not a black and white case – I’m happy to agree it goes both ways – but I can’t possibly agree that mailto links work for 100% of users, 100% of the time.

It would be beneficial to hear some reasons why, in your view, the concerns I listed above do not stack up.

If you want an easy life, don’t bother having a website. Then nobody will bother you.

I type out my email address including full words for the symbol and period… I haven’t considered an image because its not like it will save me from typing.

Anyway, great job Ben!

I’ve used contact forms in the past, but on some of my sites, I just don’t want the overhead that the Contact Plugins use.

A web form is fine when you’re an insurance company and you need a whole bunch of specifics from me before you can send me my policy… but don’t make me jump through hoops just to send you an e-mail!

I’ll either mail you from my mail client (which also keeps track of my history, bundles together e-mail conversations, etc) or I don’t mail you at all. Period.