Web site email address standard options/techniques

Question

I'm designing a website, I want to display and email address on the website. Now on many websites, you can click on the email address and either outlook, gmail or whatever client will popup with the email address pre-inserted into that mail client. Other pages let you type your email content inside the web page and send the email to the email address on the website via some mail server. I know you can use Swift mailer with php for that...

Now what are some standard practices? Also, is it possible to detect whether a user is signed in into gmail (for example) and subsequently opening the web site email address inside a new mail as a recipient for him/her?

Thank you

Answer 1

You can do either one. The former situation you described is probably the easiest. You can make links <a href="mailto:[email protected]">E-mail us!</a> which will open the user's default e-mail client; or you can create a form and use, in your case, PHP to send the mail.

Answer 2

1) mailto:[email protected] is the native HTML technique which requires a client side mail client just like you've mentioned.

2) Other technique which uses <form> tags and sends e-mail server side is an alternative way but you need to take care of more cases in this scenerio.

a) You need to be careful about the security of your web page/server. There are many hack techniques which allows hackers to spam over your web site.

b) Don't forget about the limits of your hosting. There might be a per day e-mail limit which may cause you troubles.

So, choose the method depending on your site's needs and traffic.