[thelist] mailto: long body text

[Simon Coggins]

I'm piping in a bit late on this one but I thought I'd share my
experiences, as I recently changed the guestbook on one of my sites from a
simple mailto: link to a server-side form.

I found that the number of responses increased after I changed to the
form, perhaps indicating that my visitors were more happy with a server
side solution.

On the other hand, I am now getting a significant number of 'prank'
guestbook entries and spoofed email addresses (my audience includes quite
a lot of kids so this is no real surprise). Although I do validate the
email addresses requiring @s and dots I can't tell between a valid address
and 'billgates at microsoft.com'.

While overall I prefer the server side solution (as it gives me much more
control over automatic processing of the entries), I can see that
sometimes mailto could be the way to go, particularly when you need a
valid reply address.

Simon