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Comment by neximo64 | Hacker News Reader

Some reasons:

- Not everyone will have set email up on the phone.

- If a laptop is used it adds more complexity if the email is not set up on the device, (or e.g if Gmail is used via a web browser)

- Not everyone will use the Mail app as default and will need to pick the right app

- There may be multiple emails and additional complexity to pick the right 'from' if there are multiple emails being used.

- It is a test of the SMTP server, not the ability to receive email.

- The email needs to match exactly what is being used to sign up when sending the email. With an email inbox email+label@gmail.com can be used as an example.

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Right: this would fail for me on my laptop, because I use gmail for email and don't have anything setup such that a mailto: link would compose a new email from my gmail account.

It’s actually quite easy to set this up, if you missed doing so when it asks:

https://support.google.com/a/users/answer/9308783?hl=en

If you use chrome and only chrome.

Firefox also opens a gmail tab for me when I click on a mailto: link actually

Thanks for that. I've been dealing with this issue forever (but never even thought to RTFM on the issue).

Well said. Particularly the point around people not having email set up on an “OS” level. There are a lot of people who already struggle to effectively use modern computers and smartphones, and you’ll run into all kinds of weird edge cases. For example, I previously helped a friend who had just been using the gmail website on their smartphone for years because they had forgot their password but Safaris keychain had saved it so they could auto fill the password.

I’ve encountered countless other scenarios where a user is using software in “non-ideal” way because it works for them or they don’t know any better.

I don’t remember the last time I clicked a mailto: link, and probably haven't seen one in a long time. And it’s configured to use the default Windows 10 Mail app, which I don’t use. Can I change it to Firefox and Gmail? Sure, but why would I bother?

> Not everyone will have set email up on the phone.

Exactly. And not everyone accepts HTML E-Mail, i.e. I really hate these "endless" state carrying URLs, which wrap around in my 99 chars wide terminal windows. A short SHA-xxx key should be sufficient, "dear" web form designers.

And last but not least I use greylisting, which still is a useful tool to suppress spam, but delays confirmation emails.

Text emails don't have a limited width either. If your email reader and/or terminal app is not able to deal with long URLs then that is really YOUR problem.

Good summary

Using mailto: is just asking for trouble at this day and age.

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