Comments on: Broken hyperlinks in Apple Mail

By: kll

kll — Thu, 24 May 2007 15:59:57 +0000

> Can anyone explain why outgoing mail needs to be post-formatted at all?
Because MIME/SMTP protocols are very, very old, have all kinds of weird limitations and there are a lot of badly written mail servers and clients out there.

FIY Opera’s e-mail client (AKA “M2″) does support delsp=yes standard and I think Mozilla’s Thunderbird is at least trying to (but often wraps signature delimiter when it shouldn’t)

By: Emcho

Emcho — Wed, 16 May 2007 14:09:09 +0000

Apple *does* do things badly here. The spec (RFC 3676) says

“Regardless of which technique is used, a generating agent SHOULD NOT insert a space in an unnatural location, such as into a word (a sequence of printable characters, not containing spaces, in a language/coded character set in which spaces are common). If faced with such a word which exceeds 78 characters (but less than 998 characters, the [SMTP] limit on line length), the agent SHOULD send the word as is and exceed the 78-character limit on line length.”

In other words, as long as your URLs are shorter than 998 chars, your mail client SHOULD NOT be touching them.

By: karl

karl — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 04:30:28 +0000

Apple doesn’t do things badly for once here. They implement the specification correctly. The irony is that other implementations don’t and it’s why it is annoying for others. Unfortunately.

By: Davidlow

Davidlow — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 20:44:33 +0000

Can anyone explain why outgoing mail needs to be post-formatted at all? The display of emails in different sized windows should be handled on the fly, without changing the original text at all.

If a simple word processor like TextEdit is smart enough to wrap text without adding a hard carriage return or a space, why can’t email clients do the same thing? This has bugged me since the beginning of email.

By: Otlkcon

Otlkcon — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 22:13:14 +0000

This looks like a bug unfortunately.

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/simons?entry=apple_spaces_out

The spec notes that spaces should not be inserted into URLs by the generating agent. Mail.app ignores this command.

By: Tim

Tim — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 22:02:41 +0000

John, what happens when - with a message set to Rich Text Format - you block some text in the Compose window and then select “Add Hyperlink”?

By: John

John — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 21:57:54 +0000

The Add Hyperlink… does NOT work at all, same problem. This really sucks and is totally embarassing in terms of talking with Open Source and even windowz fools who can do this without any problem.

Apple needs to QA their software much better than this.

By: Chris Mear

Chris Mear — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 14:40:55 +0000

I always put URLs in a line on their own. That way I can guarantee that, as long as they are shorter than 78 characters, they won’t be wrapped.

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 08:58:59 +0000

Sem: I can’t really remember now, but MacInTouch’s review of Mail 2.0 suggests that the “Add Hyperlink…” feature was a new thing with Tiger:

“Aside from the addition of an “Add Hyperlink?¢‚Ç¨¬¶” menu item, Mail’s composition window offers no better text or layout controls than 10.0’s Mail did in 2001.”

http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/tiger1e.html

By: sem sinatra

sem sinatra — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:37:33 +0000

i would love to do what Josh suggests but couldn’t get it to work. Does this work in Apple Mail 1.3.11?