Curious Feature: Mail.app Subject URLs
Mail.app has a curious feature, which is interesting if not immediately useful.
If you put a URL in the Subject line of an email, and some text in the body of the message, Webkit (or whatever handles the text in Mail) turns it into hyperlink.
As pointed out in a tip on MacOSXHints
, it doesn’t work if you leave the body of the message blank.
The result is a clickable subject in the delivered email:

It’s not clear to me how users could make use of this behaviour, especially since you need to put text in the body of the email to trigger the parsing, text which might as well be the URL itself.
Still, it’s something to blog about ;-)
Similar Posts:
- Setting an HTML font tag in a Mail.app message
- 10.6.4′s Black Email of Death
- WebKit nightly builds now offer Gmail rich text
- AppleScript to add iCal To Dos by email
- Attaché: Script for smarter attachments
Tags: Apple Mail, Apple Mail Trivia, mail.app, oddity, text, URL, WebKit

June 23rd, 2009 at 8:19 pm
A clickable subject the spammer said:-)
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:26 pm
Very cunning! That would never have occurred to me. Which is why I’ll never make money on the Internet ;-)
June 24th, 2009 at 6:52 am
I can use that feature.. esp in mailing links to my other account.
August 14th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
Anyone check out the new Mail.app killer called Post Box ?
http://www.postbox-inc.com/