Forms vs. email links
The first question to ask is: do you need an email link at all?
When a visitor clicks an email link, their computer will start up their default email program and open an email to that address. If the visitor uses an email application like Outlook, Apple Mail, or Thunderbird, this works fine.
But many people use web-based email sites like Gmail or Yahoo Mail, and the hyperlink won’t help these users. Instead, it will open an email program that they don’t actually use for email.
If your reason for adding an email link is to give people a way to contact your organization, in many cases it will streamline the visitor’s experience to provide a contact form instead. This contact form can collect their information and, behind the scenes, send you an email.
There are many plugins that will let you add a contact form to your site. A few common tools are:
Safe email links
Sometimes you really do want to provide an email link.
Doing this is just like creating a link to an external site, but instead of providing a web page address for the destination you use a special mailto format. So for example, you might enter
mailto:info@ghi.wisc.edu
in the URL field:
But if you simply create a standard email link, evil spambots can harvest the address from your page and add it to their evil spammy address lists.
Fortunately there are plugins to help with this. For example, Email Address Encoder will automatically detect anything that looks like an email link on the site and “obfuscate” it so that people can use it but most spambots can’t.