Allow author email to be rendered as a social

[jaime-rivas]

Have you read the Contributing Guidelines on issues?

• I have read the Contributing Guidelines on issues.

Prerequisites

• I'm using the latest version of Docusaurus.
• I have tried the npm run clear or yarn clear command.
• I have tried rm -rf node_modules yarn.lock package-lock.json and re-installing packages.
• I have tried creating a repro with https://new.docusaurus.io.
• I have read the console error message carefully (if applicable).

Description

In blog posts, the author byline renders social icons (X/Twitter, LinkedIn, website), but there is no email icon and adding an email field in author metadata is silently ignored. This looks like a parity bug with other contact methods, or at least an undocumented limitation.

Reproducible demo

No response

Steps to reproduce

1. Define an author via authors.yml or frontmatter with typical social fields plus an email, for example:

   jdoe:
     name: John Doe
     email: john.doe@example.com
     socials:
               x: johndoe
               linkedin: johndoe
               url: https://example.com
               [Even if I write email here it does not show up]

2. Build and view a blog post attributed to this author.

3. Observe that X/LinkedIn/website render as icons, but there is no email icon or mailto link, and no build-time warning that email is unsupported.

Expected behavior

An email icon appears in the byline linking to mailto:<address>

Actual behavior

Email is not rendered; the field is ignored without any warning. Other social links render normally.

Your environment

Self-service

• I'd be willing to fix this bug myself.

[Josh-Cena]

I don't think there's a particular reason why we can't render email here (other than anti-spam, I suppose; many people aren't happy with their email appearing in public without obfuscating it for crawlers). This is actually documented in our (semi-internal) JSDoc:

Mainly used for RSS feeds; if `url` doesn't exist, `email` can be used
to generate a fallback `mailto:` URL.

So its purpose does not include rendering the socials on purpose, and it isn't even included in the socials dictionary.

[slorber]

We do support author.email, as shown here: https://docusaurus.io/docs/blog#blog-post-authors

However, we don't really explain where it's used:

• As a fallback for the "author link"
• In blog Atom/JSON feeds (afaik RSS doesn't show authors)
• In the blog page structured data (SEO metadata)

We don't show the email on purpose in the list of social icons because indeed it may not be a good idea to make it visible that way.

However, in case you really want to, you should be able to use author.socials.email = "mailto://sebastien@thisweekinreact.com". The advantage of this method is also that you'll be able to decide where the email should appear in that list (because social platforms are displayed in their declaration order).

I'm not 100% sure, but for these reasons, I think it could make sense to have both author.email (already exists) and author.socials.email (new feature).

---

The problem is that we don't have a prebuilt code for socials.email, so for now it would require providing the mailto:// prefix, and swizzle components to display a custom email icon instead of our fallback 🌐 icon.

Here are the platforms we have first-class support for

  export type SocialPlatformKey =
    | 'twitter'
    | 'github'
    | 'linkedin'
    | 'stackoverflow'
    | 'x'
    | 'bluesky'
    | 'instagram'
    | 'threads'
    | 'mastodon'
    | 'youtube'
    | 'twitch';

We could easily add support for email, too.

Let me know if you want to contribute that feature.