Hadn't heard that one. Thank you very much.

Not a nubie, but not a programmer either. jr

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You'll never know which way to look, which way to see us.

Mail doesn't actually wrap lines in a non-reversible way. Apple Mail properly implements the format="flowed" and delsp="yes" extensions to plain text email, which mains that if the recipient is using a similarly capable email client, your message will come across intact, with only the hard line breaks you personally added.

That practically means when sending messages between two Apple Mail users, everything will be just fine. Get your recipients to switch. :)

This is a great tip that *usually* works, but can fail with some common (cough Outlook cough) e-mail clients.

I was aware of this tip (I think I read it on TidBITs many years ago) and used brackets for many years. However, some mail clients (I am looking at YOU, Outlook) seem to ignore the brackets. I had taken to writing the URL twice (once with brackets and once without), but people always questioned why I did *that*, so I gave up.

Microsoft Outlook also ignores "mailto:" links in the form of <mailto:clint@foo.com>, so I had to go to <clint@foo.com> to fix that one.

Grrr... :-)

Best wishes,
Clint

I have to use Windows and Outlook at work. I have Outlook set to default to RichText for a mail format. I have been using the angle brackets to create hyperlinks to web URL and network files in Outlook for years. I just doublechecked and the <mailto:someone> worked as expected for me. So it seems strange that if Outlook gets and email from Mail.app enclosing hyperlinks like this, that it would botch thems up.

"Microsoft Outlook also ignores "mailto:" links in the form of <mailto:clint@foo.com>…"
"I just doublechecked and the <mailto:someone> worked as expected for me."

Maybe it is just an issue on some implementations of Exchange/Outlook, since we have the problem at my institution.

Best wishes,
Clint

There may be a setting to disable this, and it may be set disabled by your organization as a security measure. Just speculating here....

Mail.app is one of the ones that breaks this constantly, putting in an extra space when it breaks a link over a wrap.

I've had this issue on several mailing lists I'm a member of, and Mail breaks the %@$!##@ links as often as not, brackets or no. I know it isn't simpy a client issue, and even if it were, mail should not be inserting unwanted characters in the link.

I ended up just putting a TinyURL js link on my browser's bookmark bar, so I can rapidly make tinyurls that don't break.

I usually use brackets around URLs for another reason: punctuation. If you use a URL in a sentence, most E-mail clients do not know where the URL ends and trailing punctuation (i.e., periods, question marks, and commas) begins. Using < and > around the URL avoids this problem.

-Mark

Aha!

So THAT'S the reason why OmniWeb sends URLs in brackets to Mail, if you tell it to do so!

Thanks a lot!
Björn

Nowadays most apps can render HTML emails. I used to send very long URLs as HTML and make the URL a link (embed it into a HTML anchor tag). This way the link will be properly loaded in the browser if the user clicks on it, even if it is broken into two lines.

I've had poor luck with that strategy. tinyurl.com, however, works perfectly every time.

If you select some text in Mail.app, then right-click, there is an "edit hyperlink" option where you can put the URL, also.

| This is a relatively basic tip, and one that I've personally
| known for a long time, though I don't know where I learned it.

A really long time, relatively: RFC 2396, from August 1998. See Section E., "Recommendations for Delimiting URI in Context".

I've been using this method this in all of my mail since then.

Use this as a Safari bookmark, title it "Mail URL" or something, and place it in the Bookmarks Bar.

It will do the job for you.

javascript:location.href="mailto:?SUBJECT="+document.title+"&BODY="+"<"+escape(location.href)+">"

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Mike Hubbard

This works most of the time, but sometimes all I get is the subject. The link is missing. Do you know why this happens?

I've *always* put angle brackets around urls in email messages, and they always break when some Windoze users get my message. It's not Mail causing that, it's the Windows mail client being stupid. And these users aren't smart enough to realize that the url they see in IE is shorter than the one they clicked in the message, or that there's a space in there if their mail client somehow managed to keep the entire wrapped url intact (plus the unnecessary space).

I recently found the Add Hyperlink menu item in Mail (funny how you miss a lot of features if you aren't paying attention:). I haven't actually tried sending one to Windoze users yet.