Internet Tips: Mend Your E-Mail's Broken Links

It seems so simple. You stumble upon an amazing Web site, and you want to forward the address to a few of your friends by e-mail. You select the URL in your browser's Address field, press Ctrl-C to copy it, switch to your e-mail program, and press Ctrl-V to paste the URL into your message. Then you hit the Send button, and boom! The URL is on its way.

But sometimes, your link goes boom--as I found out firsthand recently when I tried to post a message containing a fairly long URL to a mailing list of friends. Most recipients found the URL highlighted as a link in their e-mail program, but the link did not take them to the site. Several people tried copying the URL from the message and then pasting it into a browser Address window, but they still went nowhere. It turns out that the address I used was good, but the way I sent it wasn't.

The lingua franca of the Internet--ASCII text--doesn't like long URLs. Most e-mail programs break a message's text (whether typed in or copied and pasted) into lines of 70 to 80 characters, inserting a carriage return at the end of each line. Your e-mail program usually highlights the URLs in your incoming mail as hyperlinks automatically. Unfortunately, it probably won't highlight anything after the carriage return that it inserted at the end of the first line containing the URL.

Clicking the resulting URL fragment usually generates an error message. Copying the entire URL and pasting it into your browser's address window can cause the paste operation to skip everything after the invisible carriage return. True, you could try cutting and pasting individual pieces of the URL before and after the carriage return, but you may find it easier to type the URL directly into the browser address window.

I could have prevented line-wrap from breaking my link by posting the message in HTML format. For example, here are two long URLs within an e-mail message: one broken, and one that works. Some mailing-list subscribers oppose receiving messages in any format other than plain text, however, so posting an HTML message may draw more complaints than posting a broken URL.

A friend who is up on Internet rules and regulations argues that the best way to avoid line breaks in an e-mailed URL is to add <URL: to the beginning of the Web address and > to the end. Other Internet resources report that enclosing the URL between right and left angle brackets prevents the dreaded line wrap, but when I tried this I got a broken link whether I sent the URL alone (http://www.url.com), enclosed in brackets (<http://www.url.com>), or with the official URL container (<URL:http://www.url.com>).

I finally managed to send the link using Qualcomm's Eudora 5.0.2 e-mail software. No matter how I formatted the URL in Eudora, or which e-mail program I received the message with, the URL came through 100 percent functional. Nothing fancy is going on--the program simply identifies URLs and doesn't insert carriage returns in them. Think how the collective level of human e-mail suffering would fall if only the other guys would add such a feature to their programs.

Keep Your Links in Line

Netscape's Messenger requires you to take one small step to prevent long URLs from cracking up. Prepare your new message in the normal way, but then choose View and uncheck Wrap Long Lines before clicking the Send button. Neither Outlook nor Outlook Express provides such an option.

If you don't want to switch to Eudora or Messenger (or send messages in HTML format and brave the wrath of text-only purists), send people the site's shorter main URL, followed by the steps required to reach the page you're directing them to. Better yet, offer the exact commands you used to find the page through a particular search engine.