Question

I can use either xpath or CSS, doesn’t matter…but there are other a tags on the page. But I just want to use either the first a href=mailto: tag or anyone (there is actually just one, so it doesn’t matter the order).

Answer 1

You could use an XPath starts-with function:

mailto = doc.xpath('//a[starts-with(@href, "mailto:")]').first

The standardese is particularly thick in the XPath spec so hopefully the example is clear enough.