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!
Similar Posts:
- Complicated solution to Mail.app’s broken hyperlinks
- Broken Hyperlinks – Work-around 2
- A smarter solution to Mail’s hyperlink woes
- Broken hyperlinks in Apple Mail
- LinkABoo: Hyperlink to emails in other apps
Tags: Apple Mail, broken hyperlinks, mail.app, tinyURL, URLs, workarounds
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.