Pet peeve warning mode on.
I often try to ask people to remove mailto: links to me -- haven't
gotten paranoid enough to ask folks to remove my address altogether,
but it might be coming to it. Anyhow, I'm a bit baffled by this urge
to include an e-mail address in "thanks to my parents and my sponsor"
type material -- why would somebody want to mail me just because I
contributed to a FAQ (or whatever)? The people who don't know who
they're mailing are most likely to ask inane questions and/or see what
happens when they use this "mouse" thing to click on that colorful
item on the screen, and the ones who do know me from before likely
have my address on record somewhere.
Anyhow, too many automatic mailing list and Usenet archives make live
links of all mail addresses they find to make this really worth
fighting. When I stumble over my address in material obviously written
by a human, I +might+ react. When I ask to be removed, I usually offer
the URL to my home page as an alternative in case they absolutely want
to have a live link (often, I think, for its own sake -- who is going
to click it other than bored idle surfers randomly clicking their way
through cyberspace?). If somebody wants to contact me, there's a form
they can fill in and submit.
The spam aspect of this discussion is a bit moot, IMHO -- anybody
using their address in the open anywhere should expect to be harvested
sooner or later -- but I think we should perhaps discuss this from a
wider perspective. What's reasonable to include in a "kudos" section,
for example? (And is there some reason to include an e-mail address
there [or home phone number] that I've overlooked?)
Apparently, some of the web pages I have attract people who are often
fairly new to the Internet, more than the pages of some people I've
discussed this with. If you have a technical [computer-oriented] FAQ,
you'd expect your readers to know enough about netiquette to not click
on every other mailto: in the text and send off a "hi I saw your name,
wanna chat?" or whatever. Conversely, I'd really hate to see my name
with a mailto: in a gardening / pet care / desktop publishing /
toaster / food / whatever else FAQ.
/* era */
(Yeah, DTP is from my own experience)
-- Paparazzi of the Net: No matter what you do to protect your privacy, they'll hunt you down and spam you. <http://www.iki.fi/~era/spam/>