Broken Hyperlinks - Work-around
One way to solve the broken hyperlinks annoyance in Apple Mail 2.0 is to make your URLs and hyperlinks so short that they can’t break. A free service on the web called TinyURL can help you do this. Here’s how it works:
1. Go to the TinyURL web site - http://tinyurl.com.
2. Find the link to the little javascript applet on the front page which looks like this
onto the bookmarks bar of your browser (Safari in my case) like this:
3. Now whenever you want to send the hyperlink of a page you are browsing, click on the bookmark and it launches a new window with a short URL. For example, say you found a great tip for working around the broken hyperlink problem in Apple Mail. You click on the bookmark and it turns this URL
http://www.hawkwings.net/2005/08/08/broken-hyperlinks-work-around/
into this:
http://tinyurl.com/7gcjw
4. Cut and paste, or drag-and-drop the short URL - http://tinyurl.com/7gcjw (it does work. Click it and see!) - into your Mail message and you are done.
Now everyone can click on the links you send with ease. It’s not elegant, it’s not transparent, but it does work!
Tags: Apple Mail, broken hyperlinks, mail.app, tinyURL, URLs, workaroundsRelated posts
September 24th, 2005 at 9:05 am
[...] Broken Hyperlinks - Work-around [...]
November 1st, 2005 at 10:43 pm
[...] In a perverse way, I almost wish that 10.4.3 has killed more tips and work-arounds, like the ones for Broken long URLs in Apple Mail or launching Apple Mail in a hidden state. But it’s not nice to grumble on 10.4.3’s first day. Technorati Tags: Apple Mail, Address Book, Smart Group, Mail.app, 10.4.3 [...]
July 5th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
And if you use that bookmarklet, there’s even an ‘email URL’ option there that will create a new message in Mail with the URL in it.
Would be nice if someone would make a Mail plugin to automatically replace any URL of a certain length with a tinyurl…
March 24th, 2007 at 9:21 am
Enclosing the long URL in angle brackets sometimes work for me. Also writing the URL on a single line, not leaving any spaces before it.
April 4th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
For whatever it’s worth, I whipped up a quick little Mac OS X system service that provides a ‘Shrink URL’ option in the services menu. It will take a highlighted URL in any editable OS X text field, and turn it into a TinyURL equivalent. I had the URL-shrinking engine for an upcoming feature in my MU* client, and repackaged it as a service specifically so I could use it with Mail.app.
It’s a 0.1 revision at best, and it doesn’t even have a webpage on my site of its own yet, but it seems to work. http://www.riverdark.net/misc/TinyURL.zip is the service, and questions or requests about it can go into the ‘Misc Tools’ area of http://www.riverdark.net/board/
I’m more than willing to toss the source out as well if anyone really wants it, as it wouldn’t be too terribly hard to write a Mail plugin that would TinyURL-ify any URL longer than a specific number of characters.