Facebook users quickly find out that as a way to prevent email harvesting, a common practice by spammers looking to increase their lists of known working addresses, Facebook displays all email addresses as images.

While this may help, it is also an inconvenience as it forces users to manually enter the email address when trying to contact a friend.

Mozilla’s Gervase Markham suggested someone should create an extension to fix this. One day later Chris Finke released Facebook Image-to-Email, a Firefox and Netscape extension that looks for email images and replaces them with regular, clickable mailto: links. The screenshots below shows the change.

In my tests it worked perfectly except for a case where the domain name @pfizer.com was replaced by @pfizecom. You may also notice that it takes a few seconds after a page has been loaded to have the image replaces while the extension injects some JavaScript to make the conversion.

Besides that, many Facebook users will sure appreciate it.

It’s not available yet at Mozilla Add-ons, but you can get it from Chris Finke’s site.