What's the best way to write e-mail addresses?

Question

When trying to write an e-mail address, there are always problems with the @ sign.

Solutions I've seen suggested are using some verbatim environment (more difficult in footnotes) and using a math-mode @.

What is the correct way to do this?

Answer 1

Another thing one can to with the hyperref package is to use the href command

\href{mailto:me@example.com}{me@example.com}

which has the advantage that when clicked-on in an electronic document, it will (ideally) call up the mailer and cue up the e-mail address.

Answer 2

You can also combine the hyperref and url approaches to get a working link that is formatted like an URL:

\href{mailto:me@example.com}{\nolinkurl{me@example.com}}

Answer 3

Just to add to Willie's good answer, in terms of the formatting (as the OP seems to be getting at) there isn't a "correct" way. Use \textsf or \texttt or whatever looks good for your particular document and use case and font choice. Also try the randtext package to attempt to obfuscate the email address inside the PDF to make it less susceptible to spammers (but note that — I think — it doesn't play nice with hyperref's \href).

If you want to "special-case" the @ sign without adding markup to your text, you could write something like this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{color,hyperref}
    \catcode`\_=11\relax
    \newcommand\email[1]{\_email #1\q_nil}
    \def\_email#1@#2\q_nil{%
      \href{mailto:#1@#2}{{\emailfont #1\emailampersat #2}}
    }
    \newcommand\emailfont{\sffamily}
    \newcommand\emailampersat{{\color{red}\small@}}
    \catcode`\_=8\relax    
\begin{document}
\email{foobar@gmail.com}
\end{document}

where you get the proper hyperlinking of the email address and you can customise the look of the email by changing \emailfont and the look of the ampersat (or arrobase, or @) by changing \emailampersat.

Answer 4

You can define \at command in the preamble:

\newcommand{\at}{\makeatletter @\makeatother}

and then use it as follows within the document:

myemail\at gmail.com

Answer 5

Very simple solution from here:

\texttt{john@gmail.com}

Answer 6

If you don't like how the at-symbol of the default font looks (I don't), you may borrow it from the Times font, like so: youraddres{\fontfamily{ptm}\selectfont @}example.com

Answer 7

For the @ character I prefer the \MVAt command from the marvosym package, since the cmss @ looks so different from other fonts I'm used to. For the full address I use the hyperref formatting suggested by Willie.

Answer 8

I don't think that there is a unique correct way to handle this. As another answer says, you can use hyperref. But, the url package can also be used to render email addresses:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{url}

\begin{document}

\url{me@example.com}

\end{document}

Answer 9

I defined a command, to avoid the redundancy of Willie Wong's and Caramdir's answers, and to allow protocols other than mailto:

\usepackage{hyperref}
\usepackage{xstring}

\newcommand{\thelink}{\@empty}
\newcommand{\link}[2]{%
  \IfSubStr{#1}{:}{\renewcommand\thelink{#1}}{\renewcommand\thelink{#1:#2}}%
  \href{\thelink}{\texttt{#2}}%
}

There's a long form, where the URL is different than the text, and the short form, where the protocol is catenated with the text to make up the URL:

Phone: \link{tel:1234567890}{+1 234-567-890} \\
E-mail: \link{mailto}{foo@bar.spam}

Produces this result:

I use \texttt instead of \nolinkurl, because the latter removed spaces from the supplied text.

Answer 10

There are a number of things that you can try:

(with the hyperref package):

\url{email address}

or more simply (for monospace font):

\texttt{email address}